


you belong to me (my snow white queen)

by greekdemigod



Category: Jane the Virgin (TV)
Genre: (Luisa's mom), Age Difference - Rose is 27/Luisa is 21, Alternate Universe, Angst, F/F, Fluff, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Power Play, Public Sex, Smut, Top!Luisa most of the time
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-21
Updated: 2016-10-28
Packaged: 2018-08-23 20:22:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 25,415
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8341426
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greekdemigod/pseuds/greekdemigod
Summary: Luisa is a reckless party girl with a knack for getting herself in trouble.Rose is a cold, stoic lawyer and the latest in a series of people trying to get her back on the straight and narrow.It doesn't go quite as either expected.





	1. 'cause girl, you earned it

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Usually I'm so good at writing AU's, but I'll say I encountered some difficulties here. I lost my writing flow halfway through and then had to fight pretty hard to get it back. All constructive criticism would be very much appreciated.
> 
> Hope you enjoy reading!

Luisa has been in trouble many times before.

When she was little she was prone to stealing, because although her father could and would give her anything she desired, the upbringing had taught her that anything she wanted _was_ hers. As a six-year-old, her crimes had been as little as her, as innocent and steeped in childlike reasoning.

As a _sixteen_ -year-old, her bad behavior transformed into something else entirely. Sneaking out of the hotel past curfew, drinking herself into stupors, sleeping with _girls_. She had been the youngest participant of her first AA-meeting.

And now, fresh off her twenty-first birthday, she has to spend her Friday morning in a court room. It still hasn’t fully registered that whenever her father calls her ‘his little troublemaker’, he no longer means that to be cute.

What she _does_ realize is that maybe this time she has done something she can’t come back from. But she was so drunk the night before, and when she gets that far gone there is no reigning her in. It has also become clear that her brother has been right all along—she had fallen in with a wrong crowd, an _awful_ crowd, one that had abandoned her as soon as they were about to be caught.

Because of course just trying to waltz home on drunk, wobbly legs hadn’t been enough.

She can still feel the glass splinter all around them, recalls their muffled giggles as they stepped through this opening they had just made into a nice office. The tile floor, the desk, the wall paneling, the chandelier—it had all gleamed so invitingly.

Luisa was the only one that had still been there, dancing in the wreckage, when a small police force responded to the alarm that had gone off silently. When she had opened her eyes the music inside her own mind had died down instantly and a coldness had filled her instead; her ‘friends’ had left her to be found all by herself.

Her head hangs in shame, slouched in a leather seat next to her lawyer.

She doesn’t like him very much. His suit fits him ill and he reeks of a really bad cologne. The law firm that usually helps Emilio Solano with his legal woes has pulled their hands off of her though... because it is their office she has trashed.

The doors are pushed open again, resounding loudly through the space filled with low chatters and the incessant clicking of paparazzi cameras. There have been people filing in for the past ten minutes, but this is the first time Luisa looks up—and she’s so glad she does.

Now _this_ person knows how to wear a goddamn suit. It’s a startling sapphire blue, obviously made just to fit her body. Its excellent quality can be seen from afar. All pieces fit tightly to her pale skin, stretched across thin shoulders but curving around breasts and hips.

Personally Luisa would have paired it with nude heels, but the black ones don’t look too bad either.

Her gaze crawls up slowly, taking in again where the jacket narrows around her waist, held closed with only one button that would reveal, undoubtedly, another layer of custom-made, hand-tailored, exquisite fashion once undone. Then her eyes settle on the woman’s face, a work of art framed in red curls and glasses balanced on the bridge of her nose.

This is the sort of woman her father always chooses; the classy ones that know they’re beautiful. For the first time, Luisa understands.

She wonders if maybe after the hearing she’ll be able to talk to her long enough to get a phone number out of her, but those hopes disappear when the woman doesn’t sit down in the reporters’ section or even at the jury’s table—instead she passes the bar, to sit down next to her colleague at the plaintiffs’ table.

Well shit.

* * *

To make matters worse, the woman doesn’t end up being the lawyer _of_ the plaintiff. Of course not. It’s a law firm—they’re perfectly capable of defending themselves.

She’s no less than the owner of _Ruvelle & Associates, PLLC_ herself.

Rose Ruvelle. Not only is she a successful CEO of her own law firm at only twenty-seven, she is also one of the most sought-after defense attorneys in the state. Her father swears by her—he has never lost a law suit with her by his side.

Luisa is ready to throw her towel in the ring and just accept whatever fate the other wants to string up for her, because at least that way she can go sleep off the rest of her hangover. There’s no way her lawyer is going to win this and she’d like to escape from this harsh fluorescent light bashing in on her like strobe lights.

A stay in jail will look bad on her track record, and probably screw up her early acceptance into the med program of John Hopkins, but her father can buy her a spot into some lesser program when she finally ditches the orange jumpsuit again.

If she hasn’t disappointed him beyond the point of caring about her, that is.

She blocks out most of the talking happening around her because all of the legal mumbo jumbo would just give her a more skull-splitting headache. Here and there she picks up on sharp, stinging words that chronicle her transgressions, but that just makes her feel stupid on top of everything, so she tries to tune it out.

The total price of all her damage and its consequences—loss of certain documents, nine lawyers that can’t use their office today and maybe even next week if the expensive clean-up crew doesn’t get done by the end of the weekend, bad press and a loss of revenue—fills her stomach with something sour that wants to crawl up her throat and leave the wreck that she has made of herself.

Even her father pales a little at the number.

She can pay for her whole freshman year at John Hopkins with that amount of money, including a cushiony solo dorm room and all the heavy, necessary text books in prime condition. It’s dazzling—and all that caused by maybe ten minutes of her swinging a lead pole around.

“Your Honor, if I may.” Rose’s voice is velvet, but it’s charged with electricity. It has been feeling like being flayed alive to have it used against her. “At this point, I think we all agree miss Solano’s guilt is clear and that it’s down to deciding an appropriate... punishment.”

Luisa wants to say only two things to that: that she goes by _Alver_ , and that she can think of a punishment that they could both enjoy. It’s the wisest decision she has ever made to keep her lips glued together.

“But having her father pay such an exorbitant sum won’t teach _her_ anything, so if I might take the liberty of setting a verdict myself?” She cocks her head a little and smiles. “I have enough money to cover a dozen times the costs of these repairs, but we will need help getting back to our feet after this, so I propose Luisa works for me a pre-defined amount of hours. Community service, so you will. Some hard work might yet make an honest woman out of her.”

Both her lawyer and her father take the deal instantly; she doesn’t get to have an opinion about it at all. And then they’re quick to finalize the deal, so there’s no way Luisa and her big, stupid mouth can fuck it up still. At this point she just wants to go home.

“Emilio. How unfortunate that we had to meet again like this.” Rose kisses her father on both cheeks, then shakes hands with the lawyer that doesn’t even come to her ankles in terms of skill _or_ prowess. Then ice cold blue eyes settle on Luisa and she feels herself shrink ten sizes. “And you, young lady—I will see you on Monday.”

Yeah, she would like to die now.

* * *

It’s six am and her alarm blares her awake. Even during the semester of her pre-med she doesn’t have to get up that early, but to be forced to do it during summer break should be all sorts of illegal. But, Luisa is nothing if not resilient, and she has bounced back some during the weekend.

She even has a _plan_ to make the community service enjoyable.

After all, Rose Ruvelle is one _fine_ woman and Luisa is set to spend a hundred hours working directly for her.

She doesn’t think dying would be the better option anymore, but Rose is still dressed perfectly to lead her to her funeral, in a silky black suit that clings to her and frames her in a different aura than the blue suit did.

Luisa feels both underdressed and extremely attracted, but Rose is civil if not chilly and doesn’t give her more than few glances’ worth of eye contact before altogether ignoring her, talking to her as if she’s a wall ornament or a potted plant.

It’s degrading.

And a voice like that should be used to purr sinful things in her ear, not heap tasks on her as if she’s a slave. But that’s what she is now, isn’t she? Less than an intern, made to fetch coffee and sort post and take lunch orders without the reward of college credit at the end.

She halts when Rose does, careful not to bump into the woman—even if she would gladly abuse an opportunity to touch her. Their eyes meet again, Luisa tries to square her shoulders and seem bigger than she is, but the other still towers over her, both physically and mentally.

“You got all that, miss Solano?”

“Alver,” she bites back before she can stop herself. Save from a tightening of her lips, no part of her body betrays that she didn’t mean to actually say that out loud.

A perfect eyebrow arches up over the rim of her glasses. “Excuse me?”

“I go by Alver. Luisa _Alver_.”

“I will call you whatever I should please, miss Solano. You’re in no position to make any further demands on my hospitality towards you. Now chop chop, I believe I gave you plenty of work to do.”

It doesn’t even matter that she’s wearing a dress with a deep (but tasteful) neckline, that her tan looks amazing with the stark whiteness of it, that her heels make her legs and thighs look delectable and perfect to spread open, preferably across a desk or something.

Rose looks at her like she’s not worth even a minute of her time.

“I’ll get right to it, _boss_ ,” she mutters, rolling her eyes.

But when she tries to spin away and get to it, Rose’s hand shoots out and clenches around her arm. The way her fingers dig in almost hurts. Arousal makes her knees buckle. “And I’ll have no attitude from you, either. You’re a spoiled little daddy’s girl, but guess what? Your father doesn’t hold any sway here and neither do you. Understood?”

Luisa squeaks. It shouldn’t be turning her on like this, not when she’s getting the telling-to of her life. Rose is really putting her in her place and no one has ever done that, not like this, and though it gets to her, the part of her that just wants Rose to push her against a wall and kiss her is much stronger.

Rose releases her and shakes her head. Luisa loves watching her stride away, skin burning where Rose held her and arousal pulsing in time with her rapid heartbeat.

She’s sure she’ll get past the redhead’s defenses eventually.

* * *

Luisa doesn’t get to see Rose again that week and maybe that’s for the better. She would just be thinking about the fastest way to get the woman undressed 24/7 if she had been around. Instead briefing her has been relegated to an actual intern, some pretty blonde that Luisa would have been all over if she hadn’t had her sights set higher already.

The girl is nice though, but rather than appreciating it Luisa misses Rose, cold blue gaze and cold steel behavior included. It speaks volumes of how fucked-up she is that she considers the finger-sized bruises on her arm trophies—she has been covering them up at work to show some semblance of being appropriate, though.

The work remains dull. She already knows that working at an office will never be for her. But as she gets to know the lawyers and starts to understand how much they have to do in a day, providing them support and taking care of their administrative needs as well as being their errand girl stops feeling like the most ungrateful way to spend her vacation.

But they still make sure to remind her that she’s an outsider, that they never would have _chosen_ her. She is shunned from the break room and has to deal with accusing glares and cold shoulders on a daily basis.

She isn’t here to make friends, she keeps telling herself that, and works the eight hours with her posture straight (the only thing straight about her on any given day, except on days when she straightens her hair) and her eyes full of fierce determination.

Luisa drags herself home every night sore and tired, feet aching from walking around in heels for eight hours on end, arms aching from carrying stacks of papers, head aching from how mind-numbing it is to be at the office without a certain someone to spice it all up.

Yet she returns every day and soon, her first week is over and it’s the weekend and she has _freedom_ again. It has never tasted as sweet as it does then. But instead of seeking her former friends out, or making new ones, or reconnecting with previous ones; instead of going out to a club or a lady bar or the beach; instead of doing anything like she usually would, she sleeps in and spends much of her Saturday and Sunday relaxing, recharging from the long, tiring week.

If this is what the next two weeks are going to look like, she might ask her father to pay Rose back instead after all, so she won’t turn into the most boring person ever.

* * *

“Good morning, miss Solano.” Rose is wearing another suit, a dark green one this time, and Luisa wants to ask if she has anything else in her closet, but that would just send her own thoughts reeling away to inappropriate places. “I’ve been hearing quite positive things about you.”

She is taken aback by the unexpected compliment. A slow smile spreads on her face and she even takes a bow, hem of her skirt held in her hands. “I aim to please.”

“You’ll be with me today.” Rose gets up out of her desk chair smoothly and honest to God _struts_ across the room as if it’s her walkway, to open up the only other door in the office. It’s an open plan, ten desks scattered across the space, although Rose’s is biggest and set in a little alcove, shielded off from the rest by smart positioning of plants and decorations.

The door leads to the meeting room she has had to restock and clean several times last week. There’s already people sitting around the big mahogany table. Unfortunately. Otherwise she might’ve been able to seduce Rose onto that very same table with her legs open.

Instead she is made to sit next to Rose, behind a laptop, to take notes. “I don’t know law speak though,” she complains, but Rose waves her remark away.

“You’ll be fine.”

She isn’t fine. It’s not even the language—that part goes surprisingly fine. It’s the sitting-next-to-Rose part that’s fucking her up. Because she’s beautiful, in a regal way, with her angular features cut from smooth marble and the dash of pink shimmering through her pale skin, the freckles that appear the moment she focuses on the other, lips that even manage to form into a smile.

And she smells nice, of a flowery perfume—it might be roses, but Luisa doesn’t want to think about that because she’ll roll her eyes and alert everyone to her thoughts _not_ being on the subject.

It’s all a little distracting, so she misses parts here and there, paraphrases because surely direct quotations aren’t _that_ important.

Two hours later they resurface to the life she has come to know, of ever-ringing phones and a revolving door of clients, of papers spewing out of the monster of a copy machine and a coffeemaker that never stops churning out caffeine fixes. Luisa breathes in deeply and turns to Rose, ready to be scolded for how inappropriate she was—because surely her staring had to have been noticed—but instead she gets a tight, measured smile.

Rose has smiled kinder, prettier smiles at the one intern that never does anything right, but it’s aimed at _her_ and so she’ll take it. “That wasn’t so hard, was it? Now come on, it’s time to go.”

There is a spring to Luisa’s step as she scrambles to catch up with Rose, even though the last two hours have been a torture on her college frat boy’s libido. She should get an award for not sliding her hand up Rose’s knee or something. “So now that you’re treating me like at least half a human, want to tell me what you were doing last week?”

“Things that don’t concern you,” Rose replies curtly, the smile now all gone.

Luisa rolls her eyes. “They _do_ concern me, though. You’re the one that’s supposed to convince the judge at the end of this road that I’ve done adequate work. How will you know when you’re not even around?”

Rose looks at her as if she might have made a point, but the look disappears quick, to make place for impatience. “You still have no business knowing, but if it soothes you to know, I won’t be gone again until next week. Incidentally, I won’t be here for your last day, but I’m sure my employees will send you off on your way just as well.”

“I can’t _wait_ to get back to my freedom, you know?” Luisa says as she watches Rose pick together documents, shrug on her coat and retrieve her purse. She’s good to go—no jacket needed in the Miami heat. “Laze at the beach, go to parties, bang chicks.” At that last bit she looks at Rose even more intently, hoping to pick up some reaction, but there is none.

Instead, there’s another cold half-smile. “You wouldn’t have had to take a break from those... lovely pastimes if you hadn’t destroyed my office.”

Luisa knows Rose isn’t a robot. There is some warmth in her, a part of her that cares. She has seen snippets of it with co-workers and now that she applies herself to the task, she can remember some of the stories her father told her of dinner parties after won trials where Rose apparently was the center of a party, and then not in an everyone-gravitates-to-power kind of way.

She’s thinking about that while they’re in the car driving who-knows-where, but she doesn’t really care as long as she gets to be near Rose.

“Okay, so if you won’t tell me about where you’ve been, will you tell me something else about yourself then?”

Rose shoots her a quick glance before looking back at the road before her. “What do you want to know?”

 _Everything. What you like to do when you’re not at work, why you’re so cold towards me, if there’s a way I can make you warm instead, what makes you weak, is your neck sensitive, can I get you out of your suit?_ Instead: “Why’d you save me in court?”

“I don’t enjoy ruining the life of someone so young. And you might be annoying and terribly unprofessional, but I’m sure you do have your qualities. Besides, we all deserve a second chance sometimes.”

Somehow this conversation has turned into something genuine and Luisa can’t bring herself to break it with humor or inappropriate remarks like she usually does when things get uncomfortably _serious_. “Thank you,” she sighs, head resting against the window, canted just so she can still look at Rose. “I’m too pretty for jail.”

“You wouldn’t have gotten a very long sentence, if you’d have gotten one at all.” Rose turns to her after she has parked the car next to the sidewalk and shut down the engine. “Don’t make me regret my decision, Luisa.”

 _I won’t_.

* * *

Things get marginally better after that. Rose still isn’t _warm_ towards her, and more often than not transgresses back into a completely cool behavior, but Luisa can’t forget those few minutes in the car and how human Rose had become.

And the older woman does stick around for the days after that. There are no more days full of meetings where the other requires her to be there alongside her and take notes, or help her set up, but she’s always around.

Luisa catches her look more than a few times a day and it bolsters her confidence. She almost gave up on her plan last week, when the other wasn’t around, but now it’s not only just back, it’s back with a ferocity to it that is all-consuming.

Nothing like a truly hard conquest for Luisa to sink her teeth into.

(She would also like to sink her teeth into Rose.)

Rose tries to hold onto her power and Luisa does enjoy being talked to with that stern voice and that stern look—it raises goose bumps all over her—but the way Luisa smiles back at her usually undermines it outright, so that the other huffs and spins away.

But the days go by surprisingly fast and she only manages to get those spare moments with Rose. Luisa takes to swinging by Rose’s desk when she heads on home for the night for at least five minutes she can consistently squeeze out of the last of the day.

That’s where she has noticed that the other doesn’t go home at the same time as everyone else. Her co-workers are always packing up and getting ready to leave at five, sometimes five thirty, but Rose is always still busy, taking a phone call here and just opening up a new file there.

On Thursday evening Luisa sticks around half an hour longer, to see if Rose just wants to wrap up what she’s doing before leaving, but when her boss notices her she gets sent home and she still doesn’t know.

On Friday evening she is subtler about it; she heads to a restaurant across the street, invites Rafael over to have dinner with her, and spends most of the meal looking at the big glass front windows of the law office, one single light burning in the back.

Rose still isn’t out by eight.

Her days are dwindling too fast, seeping through her fingers like sand. It has already been two weeks, a little more than eighty hours. She has only twenty hours left. _Twenty_. And Rose won’t even be there on her last day.

If she’s going to make a move, it’ll have to be... Well, it’ll have to be _now_.

Rafael notices she’s distracted, of course, but it isn’t until they’re clearing away the dishes from their desert that he says something about it. “What’ve you been thinking about all night?”

“Just my boss.” Luisa grins, takes a sip of her water—wishes it was something stronger to give her some liquid courage—gets up. “Who I’m going to go talk to. You head on home, and if daddy’s around tell him I’m not up to anything bad.”

Well.

This whole ordeal had almost allowed her to forget who she was. _Luisa Alver_. Doesn’t take no for an answer. Makes a way if there isn’t one. Jumps through a window if there’s no door. She is the stuff of legends—and getting caught, being punished like this had made her forget that there wasn’t anything she couldn’t do.

But she remembers that now. It took a moment of panic to remember that she doesn’t _wait for it_ , she takes. And if there isn’t enough time, she’ll damn sure demand more.

Her stride is a confident swagger and for the first time since court she doesn’t feel like a little girl as she goes to face Rose Ruvelle. 

* * *

“Did you forget something?”

Luisa smirks as Rose’s gaze lands on her instantly. She sways with her hips as she walks closer and doesn’t say anything until she’s right in front of Rose’s desk. “You’re working real late, boss.”

“Yes.” No denial, not even much of an emotion in the reply at all. “That wasn’t an answer to my question though. What are you doing here, Luisa?”

“I came to see you, of course.”

Rose stands up, all fluid motion, stark white suit rustling. Of course. She had almost forgotten what Rose had been wearing that day. It looks like pure sin, the fabric hugging her tight, pants leaving no mystery about how lovely and long her legs are. The other suits have been nice, but this one makes her want to do unspeakable things to the woman inside it.

Rose seems exasperated though, but she makes a mistake. She takes her glasses off and slowly lifts the hem of her shirt to clean them, but in doing so reveals a strip of toned stomach and it finally shakes Luisa fully awake.

“Tell me that in the past two weeks you’ve never thought of this,” she says, walking slowly around the desk, watching Rose closely, her hunger barely hidden. “That you haven’t been watching me too.”

She comes to a halt in front of the redhead, who has slid her glasses back into place and looks every bit the respectable lawyer and CEO again, but her mouth is slightly agape and her tongue lies still, not producing any sort of reply that would shut her right down.

“That I _surprise_ you.”

“You’re still a spoiled little princess, I see.” Rose doesn’t move though. She blinks slowly and Luisa _swears_ she can see the ice blue start to melt. “You’re entitled and ungrateful and cocky.”

“You flatter me.”

“And you’re right.”

Luisa moves closer, Rose backs up against her desk. Well, that’s perfect. “Yeah?” The distance between them thins and thins, Rose’s legs slide open, and don’t mind if Luisa slides between them. Her hands set on the woman’s knees and her smile has become a wicked, hungry thing. She’s a predator and her prey has finally been caught.

Rose tilts her head up. Luisa shivers as she feels power start to ebb away from the other. It’s almost tangible in the tension between them, in how they’re both waiting for _her_ to shatter it.

She’s good at that.

Luisa kisses her hard, intent on taking _all_ the power for her own. She has never desired a woman more like she does Rose, right now, but she won’t do it on the other’s terms.

She’s too wild and untamable to submit to an ice queen.

Her tongue teases the seam of Rose’s lips and a soft chuckle escapes her when Rose opens her mouth without a second’s hesitation.

There’s no stopping Luisa then. Her desire has been stoked, low in her body, and she’s burning to make Rose hers. Her mouth descends down her neck, her tongue dips into the groove of her collarbone, her teeth dig into her shoulder.

Rose’s hands slide up her sides, but Luisa is having none of that. She pushes Rose down across her desk and climbs on top of her, continuing to ravish Rose’s pale throat, littering it with small bites and marks, and her hand has Rose’s arms pinned above her head.

This is power. And it’s hers.

Part of it is Rose allowing her to. She’s a small girl, really, alcohol abuse thinning her to a slip of a girl, so there’s no way she should be able to hold down a grown woman this easily. The fact that she does anyway, that Rose has become almost suppliant beneath her…

There’s no feeling like it.

Rose arches up into her when she palms at a clothed breast, fingers digging as hard as Rose did to her on that first day, and that seems so long ago now. Rose had still been her superior then, so far out of her reach.

Now that same woman whimpers pitifully, eyes dark and looking up at her pleadingly.

Oh how the tables have turned.

“You like that, hm?” Luisa smirks. “Look at you. Even fallen from grace you’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.”

Rose tries to surge up, but she finds the same restraining hand pinning her down and this time Luisa leans her weight down on it, to truly be the one keeping her down, and it causes such a pathetic moan that her thighs quiver at the sound of it.

“Now, now. I’ve had to wait a long time for this. But I might be inclined to...”

“Yes.” The breath rushes out of Rose. “Fuck me. Luisa...”

Luisa releases Rose’s arms and slides a hand into white pants instead, fingers curling around her clothed pussy, digits rubbing slowly across the fabric. “I’m not sure you really want it, though.”

“ _Please_.”

Well, she really _does_ aim to please.

Rose is so wet that she can push her fingers into her so _easily_ , it’s really remarkable how such a dominant and strong woman becomes weak under the slightest bit of power from someone else. Luisa has never been more turned on.

Getting to watch Rose contort atop her own desk, still dressed in that fine suit that constricts some of her movements, hides the woman from Luisa’s hungry gaze--it’s not perfect, but fuck if it isn’t hot, and it’s only their first time.

Luisa is pretty sure it won’t be the last.

Rose claws into her own hair and looks right at Luisa as she comes, bucking like a wild animal, wetness pooling over Luisa’s fingers and soaking into her pants. She keeps curling inside her, sweet and exploring now, and strokes the woman wrapped around her down from the high that seized her.

Luisa brings her digits to her mouth and sucks them clean. Rose shudders and has to close her eyes, to even out her breathing and still herself.

Several minutes have passed before Rose pushes up from the desk and wraps an arm around Luisa’s neck. Luisa lets her, sinks into kiss, hand tangling in red locks. Then she yanks, revels in the sharp hiss it results in, and pulls Rose back from her.

“Hey, Rose?” she purrs sweetly, pressing one last kiss to the corner of Rose’s mouth. “I’ll see you on Monday.”

She’s almost at the front door when Rose finally realizes that she _means_ it. She shouts, “Hey, wait, where are you going?” after her, but by then Luisa’s already opened the door and slipping through.

It’s torture, truly; she can barely walk straight with how aroused she is. But she has a feeling that it’ll drive Rose crazy all weekend—and Luisa would like to see her try and get back to being an ice queen after that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading!


	2. another taste of heavenly rush

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Honestly, I didn't expect I'd be adding more to that first chapter and now I'm committing to five chapters, it's... unexpected, but actually pretty nice. I love these versions of Rose and Luisa.
> 
> Hope you enjoy reading!

The clothes make the woman. Rose has known this all her life and has always used both her body and the way she presents it to get exactly what she wants, whether that is for a key witness to testify or for a woman to go home with her, and she noticed immediately that there is something almost impossible about not listening to a woman wearing a powerful suit.

But as she sifts through her wardrobe, none of her many expensive, custom-tailored suits seem appropriate anymore. Something has shifted and she knows what it is, too.

 _Luisa_.

She’s glad the weekend is finally over because it has been torture. Luisa walking out on her had nullified her satisfaction, leaving her cold and confused standing at her desk. The days after had been filled with a lot of thinking and an inability to relieve herself of all the aching.

Her own hands had become inadequate.

They couldn’t make her feel like Luisa’s had. Thinking about the way she had been suppressed, how the girl had so easily overpowered her with a fierce will and exquisite skill left her shivering and throbbing every time, but not even her toys could help her this time.

She has always been dominant in both her business and private life, but maybe she has been wrong all that time. And it took a skinny, troublesome girl to make her see it.

Fingers brush along skirts as she revels for a moment in her annoyance, then, just as she finds something that she _does_ want to wear, forces it to evaporate. She has plans for Luisa today and she can’t allow herself to be angry for them.

She matches the blood red skirt with a black top, combs out her hair, applies make-up and calls it done. Usually more times goes into her preparation, but today, for some reason, she’s _dying_ to get to the office already...

Being in her car only reminds her more of Luisa though—she can still feel the ghost of the girl clinging to the leather upholstery, because never in her life has she met someone who is so singularly _alive_. She might not make the best decisions, but at least she’s always _doing_ something.

Rose secretly envies that.

When she gets to the office Luisa is there, alright. But so is the rest of her team, save Victoria, the only one she would call a friend, but chances are very big she’s still on a coffee run. Everyone being there makes it a little dangerous to ogle Luisa, but she can't help it.

Because what she’s wearing is some fresh, holy hell.

A light pink blouse with the top buttons undone and jeans short that cling tight to her thighs reveal long, smooth inches of tan skin. There is so much room for her to _touch_ and it makes her mouth go dry a little just imagining that she will finally get to do that.

Rose looks like she hasn’t slept all weekend; Luisa looks like she came straight from the beach.

And then Luisa has the audacity to wink and Rose has to swallow a groan far down the back of her throat, because this is the exact reason she has come up with a little plan.

“Team, I’ve got an announcement. Today will be Luisa’s last day.”

There are some frowns, Reyna and Avery exchange hushed whispers, but Luisa looks like she just got slapped. All those reactions are completely understandable.

She allows a small smile to take root, a sweet little thing. “I think she deserves to enjoy her summer break more. And I’m sure she has learned her lesson.” Luisa crosses her arms and a stubborn pout settles on lips Rose wants to feel against her own again, and anywhere, as soon as possible— _now_ , really. “That’s all. Let’s get to work.”

Before Luisa can scatter with the rest of them, Rose drags her into the conference room. She locks the door first, brings down the blinds—she really didn’t think she’d ever be hooking up at work when she had the entire office made out of glass walls—and listens for a moment, to make sure none of her co-workers are nearby.

When she turns around, Luisa’s facial expression is still a little sour and stricken, but a corner of her mouth is pulled up into a smile that is devilish and turns Rose on instantly. Not that she needs much to get her going; after the weekend she’s had, just the sight of Luisa licking her lips would have her trembling.

“Trying to get rid of me already, are we?

“I wanted to make _this_ less inappropriate,” Rose says as she closes the distance between them and kisses Luisa.

She has been thinking about this all weekend, reliving the kisses and the way the other touched her, but reality is so much better. Luisa feels warm and solid against her, and she does this thing where she juts her lip out so she can suck Rose’s bottom lip between her teeth that drives her a little crazy.

Rose might have initiated this, but Luisa runs with it. Thumbs press against her hips and fingers dig into the back of them, and being manhandled by a twenty-one-year-old _should_ offend her; but there is nothing offensive about the way Luisa drives her against the table and holds their bodies close together.

The kiss stops the moment Rose puts her hands on Luisa’s thighs.

They are as soft and warm as she expected, and because she is so entranced by watching her digits slowly stroke up and down the darker skin she doesn’t notice the way Luisa is looking at her, until she finally looks up to gauge the brunette’s reaction.

Luisa has her lips set in a tight, pursed line and something _burns_ in her dark eyes. “No.”

“No?”

Just like that, all the power slips away from her again as Luisa swats her hands away and pins her down with a gaze. “You don’t get to touch me yet.”

Her whine is low, but Rose listens. She doesn’t want Luisa to run out on her again until she’s gotten to explore the other’s body to feed her curiosity and her desire to give back as much as she gets.

Eye for an eye, orgasm for an orgasm; and by her count, Luisa is already one behind.

Luisa is a little shit, there is no denying it. The proud look she’s now wearing, the way she looks down at her as if she _owns_ her now, the way she presses her tongue against her teeth as she grins—she’s an asshole, but Rose is into it.

She wants to squeeze her thighs together, but Luisa pushes her legs apart instead, and it hurts a little, and Luisa is more rough than she realizes—or maybe she’s _exactly_ as rough as she thinks she is, and fuck if that doesn’t make her squirm in place—and the only thing she can think is _fuck, this girl owns me._

She’s a mess already and she has barely been touched yet.

“Good call on the skirt,” Luisa says as she bends down to mouth along the neckline of Rose’s top, hands crawling from her knees up to her thighs, forcing the fabric up along with them. Rose can’t do much other than clench her hands around the edge of the table and _watch_.

She isn’t sure what she expects, but it’s not for Luisa to sink to her knees and take her panties off with her teeth, hands still on her thighs, eyes turned upwards.

Rose’s knees buckle and she inches back, so that she can rest her weight _on_ the table. Her legs won’t hold out long like this.

Lips press tenderly to the inside of her ankle, up her calf, to the inside of her knee, up her thigh. Rose shivers and tries not to make a sound that’ll give them away. A soft _“Luisa,”_ falls off her lips though, but she could not have stopped _that_ if she’d tried.

“So... the curtains match the rug,” Luisa hums thoughtfully and runs a finger softly down the single strip of curly, red hairs. Rose bites onto her tongue hard and ignores how utterly revealing she is as her arousal starts to drip along her thighs.

It’s going to soak into the carpet if Luisa keeps this up, but Rose has never cared less about stains.

“I was hoping you’d be a real redhead.”

Luisa moves her hands around, bunching the last of the skirt up around a narrow waist, and settles her grip tightly on Rose’s ass. She is slid precisely to the edge and doesn’t get offered much more time to prepare herself than that before Luisa licks into her and the world morphs into all static noise and eyes squeezed tightly shut.

She’s so _good_ at this.

For a few minutes Rose manages to keep white-knuckling her hands around the table, but it’s not enough. She wants to touch Luisa so badly. Her fingers clench into the soft and gentle waves of brown hair that cascade down the girl’s back but it’s a mistake.

Rose cries out softly when Luisa pulls away from her and even seeing the girl’s glistening mouth isn’t enough to soothe the jarring ache of the interruption. Her thighs shake as she forces her hands to go right back to their former resting place. “Sorry.”

“Don’t touch me again, Rose, or I’ll leave you hanging.”

And fuck, she trembles with how those words make her throb.

She doesn’t touch her again and so Luisa doesn’t stop again until Rose is bucking against her face, attempting not to scream Luisa’s name for her whole office to hear while the table creaks under her powerful trashing.

Rose doesn’t even notice Luisa has helped her down from the table and onto the carpet until a few moments later, when the latter is getting up and making it look like she’s going to walk away. She can’t use her voice until even the last flashes of Luisa’s retreating form have disappeared.

_Fuck._

* * *

You’d think that Rose would be glad at least her needs are taken care of, but it feels a little void without getting to feel Luisa, too. She also can’t think about anything other than Luisa’s skin beneath her fingers, the little taste she got of it not nearly enough, and feeling her muscles shift as she kisses her here and touches her there.

She fucks up several times during the span of the day. Her thoughts are impossible to reign in, so she’s thinking about cupping Luisa’s breasts while she’s on the phone with a long-standing client of hers (who fortunately accepts the lie that she’s tired and a little sick to excuse how absent she is), and when she and Victoria head out for lunch during their hour of break she imagines the sliding of their bodies together so intently that she becomes wet and pulsing inside her panties and her cheeks flush with her arousal.

Luckily her friend doesn’t say anything about it, but Rose knows she knows, and it feels so unfair that Luisa can have this sort of effect on her when it doesn’t even seem difficult for the girl to ignore her own urges.

If she even has them.

But if she does, maybe she went to masturbate after leaving the conference room and that sends her down a whole new spiral of thoughts that destroy her capability of getting any work done.

The office is too warm and bright, the chatter around her too inane and loud, and time goes by much too slowly. She checks her phone at least every ten minutes, but the later it gets, the more frequent it becomes. She hasn’t chewed on her nails since she was a teenager, but the bad habit comes back with a vengeance as she grows more and more frustrated with the situation.

And Luisa is nowhere to be found.

Not that Rose would _do_ anything. She has no idea how Luisa is so effective with what she does, but it doesn’t feel like she has much of a choice with how things go between them. Luisa sets the terms, the tempo. Luisa won’t let her touch her, and so Rose won’t, _can’t_ , and it’s the worst thing that has ever happened to her.

She’s pacing behind her desk by five pm, when most people start filing out for the day. Some wave and shout at her, but she’s not hearing them.

Luisa’s voice haunts through her mind and the sight of her, hovering above her, kneeling between her legs, repeats and repeats and repeats until she’s sure she’s going to blow a fuse.

She won’t even care if Luisa doesn’t touch her again today, or this _week_ , or if she doesn’t even get to touch herself at all for just as long—she wants to get her hands on Luisa already.

And then they’re all alone and Luisa comes out of hiding, grinning with those sinful lips and swaying with her sinful hips, and how can she still look so innocent even when Rose knows what she knows and remembers what she remembers.

Luisa chuckles, slowly tracing her tongue along her own bottom lip. “You’re a wreck.”

“Luisa...”

“I don’t even recognize you as the lawyer that got me into this... _punishment_ ,” she drawls on, steadily coming closer in small steps. “You were acting so _superior_ then and look at you now. I bet you’re so wet, too. Have you been thinking about _anything_ else at all?”

“No.” The confession slips readily out of her, eyes dilated and glued to Luisa’s every move; the way her blouse billows against her upper arms, the gentle rising and falling of her chest as she breathes, the muscles in her throat moving, dark eyes those of a predator on the prowl.

“Well, it’s been... an experience working for you. Maybe I’ll see you around in Miami sometime.”

And the way Luisa smiles then, _knowing_ she has absolutely won even if Rose hasn’t said it yet. The girl is dangerous, and Rose was a fool to think she could contain that fire with her hands when all it did was burn her.

“Luisa, _please_.”

And there it is.

* * *

Rose gets to take her home after that. Her fingers shake a little as she tries to unlock the door to her apartment, but as soon as they’re inside Luisa kisses her. She drops her keys so her arms can slide around Luisa’s waist and hold her against her, their mouths pushing so hard together that the pressure rushes all the way through her.

Luisa scratches lightly beneath her jaws and Rose whimpers into the kiss.

“Show me your place?” Luisa asks when they pull away, even though her lips look swollen from how roughly they kissed and her pupils are dilated. Her voice has taken on a husky tone too that only lights up Rose’s desire more.

But a quick house tour first, then.

Her apartment isn’t much, but it’s wholly and entirely hers. She could afford bigger, could stuff it full of art and furniture, but she likes it this way. The cream-colored couch was with her in her dorm room during law school, there are framed paintings of roses from artist friends of hers strung up along her walls, and there is a piano in the corner, beneath her big windows, that pulls attention to itself immediately.

Luisa falls for it too.

She sits down on the piano bench and runs her fingers over the keys, not just from left to right but playing a little melody. Rose smiles to discover this thing they have in common.

“How long have you been playing?” she asks as she takes up the space next to Luisa. “It’s not what I’d expect of you.”

“I’m a rich guy’s only daughter,” Luisa replies, shrugging one shoulder as she plays a jazzy tune and grins at Rose. Rose tries not to memorize that grin to dream about later. “He had me enrolled in piano classes, ballet, and gymnastics before I turned six. I stuck with gymnastics the longest, but I’m generally just not good with what people want me to do.”

 _Yeah, no kidding_.

They’re looking at each other, knees resting together, the space of three piano keys between them. Rose can see the small moles shimmering through Luisa’s make-up, can smell the girl’s shampoo and perfume and a hint of sweat from a long day working in the heat of Miami in summer. It’s a heady, dizzying mix that is entirely Luisa and entirely addictive.

“I think I’ve punished you enough,” Luisa mutters and slowly rises up, to press her mouth against Rose’s and shift herself into the woman’s lap.

Rose sighs against Luisa’s lips and lands her hands immediately on the younger woman. The shorts really are as tight against her ass as they seemed; she kneads into the soft flesh through the rough fabric and revels in the way Luisa moans into her mouth even as her tongue licks into her.

Luisa is better at multi-tasking than Rose has been.

The piano clangs as Rose pushes forward, pushes Luisa up against the instrument so she can kiss down her chest, following fingers that nimbly undo buttons and push aside bright cotton to reveal—

“Fuck, you’ve been braless all day?”

“Took it off before I came up to you after work.”

Rose doesn’t say anything to that, just sucks a dusky nipple into her mouth and runs her tongue along it, suckling it, while she’s kneading Luisa’s other breast. She pulls off with a pop and smiles; the smile Luisa gives her back fills her chest with warmth.

Normally this is the point where alarm bells go off and her traumatic childhood experiences catch up with her, but Luisa has completely entranced her.

“Take me to your bed,” Luisa purrs, shifting forward so they’re kissing again, and Luisa’s chest is rubbing against her front and Rose is _melting_ , sighing softly at the friction between their bodies as she solidifies her grip on Luisa’s jeans-clad ass and lifts her up.

Luisa doesn’t weigh nearly as much as a healthy girl of her size and age should, and though that makes it easier for Rose to carry her through the hallway and into her bedroom, a part of her is trying to make sure she doesn’t forget this—and do something about it afterwards.

The bed dips with their weight and they bounce a little together, but their soft laughs are muffled against the other’s mouth and they’re really too busy to pay it much mind, anyway, hands roaming and bodies sliding together.

Rose swears when Luisa, after wriggling out of the shorts and grinding in the most unfair ways up against her, wraps their hands together and slides them down the front of her panties. It’s like being given _permission_ to fuck her and Rose didn’t know that was a thing that could turn her on to the point where all she can hear is the pounding of her heart in her ears and feel blood rushing through her.

It’s unfair that Luisa somehow hones in on _all_ the things that kill her, even if Rose has never even known about those.

The brunette is soft and wet around her fingers and there is nothing more beautiful than the pure, unfiltered looks that flit across Luisa’s face now. She is dynamic in her expressions, and Rose can’t stop looking as this goddess of a young girl moves on top of her mattress and is so oblivious to anything else in the throes of her pleasure.

Watching Luisa orgasm is a gift and a reward.

“It’s like—like it’s really been three days of me ignoring my arousal,” Luisa mutters, pressing her hand to her forehead as she laughs. “I don’t know why I did that to myself.”

Rose sinks onto the mattress next to Luisa and gently turns her so they’re facing again. Sticky fingers clasp around the back of her neck and tug her forwards. A few kisses later Rose finally replies, “You do know why you did that.”

“Yeah, I did, didn’t I? Worked like a charm.” Luisa kissed just Rose’s bottom lip, a tender gesture that twisted at her heart, then looked deep into her eyes. “Can I eat you out again? You taste _divine_.”

Rose tries not to completely lose all her wits at that. She sits upright, pulls Luisa with her and grins as she leads the other woman out of her room. “In the shower. I want to take you out to dinner afterwards.”

* * *

For the second time that day she’s unsure of what to wear, but this time for another reason. She’s taking Luisa _out_ ; even if the word ‘date’ hasn’t been dropped, that’s pretty much what it is, and Rose hasn’t been on a date with someone she was actually interested in for a good while.

“Wear the blue suit,” Luisa whispers, brushing lips and damp hair against her shoulder in passing. “When I saw you in it at the trial I wanted to take it off you so badly, so... that’s what’ll be happening tonight.”

Her shoulder burns where Luisa kissed her and all her senses are in overdrive trying to process the extraordinary phenomenon that is Luisa Alver.

If she wasn’t so preoccupied, she would notice that Luisa is waking a part of her that has been dead to feeling for over a decade. Instead she is blissfully unaware—putting on a suit to take a girl out on a date that has already proven that she gets whatever she wants.

All Rose’s defenses are down for it now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! Let me know what you're thinking about it so far? :)


	3. you thought an angel swept you off your feet

Time passes fast. The moment Luisa gets back to freedom, her days start to string together in a blur of beach, nightlife and Rose. There have been many parties, with college friends that are trickling back to Miami in time for the academic year, but even more nights spent in Rose’s apartment.

Her family is used to her being gone; they’re glad that whenever she _is_ around, she isn’t accompanied by a police officer there to drop her drunk, problematic ass home.

Her father doesn’t care to know. Rafael does ask, and his eyes go wide when he hears Luisa managed to wrap _Rose Ruvelle_ around her finger. He was there during the trial; he has met her. He might trick himself into thinking he's the smoothest, most charming member of the family, but Luisa will always be above and beyond anything he can do.

Weirdly, it _is_ Emilio that proposes to invite Rose to the annual Solano’s end-of-summer dinner, a ‘small’ celebration on the last Friday of summer break. It started as a tradition for the family, but ever since Elena divorced him it has grown into something unrecognizable.

Luisa has to admit she likes what is has become much better. She’s always in for a party.

“Invite Rose?” she asks though, because that’s one thing she did not expect. Her eyebrows arch. “Why would you do that?” Her gaze flickers to Rafael, but he shrugs, indicating he hasn’t a thing to do with this surprising turn of events.

She chooses to believe him. They both know Emilio Solano still doesn’t really accept that his daughter is gay, let alone have a relationship with an older woman that was supposed to guide her back to the right path. Not corrupt her with some more _lesbianism_. Rafael wouldn't throw her under the bus like that.

Luisa sips a clear liquid that looks like water but burns too much in her throat to be.

Emilio nods to himself, putting his phone down for a moment to look his daughter dead-on in the face. One fraction of a second, Luisa believes he is onto her. Somehow she has given herself away.

But then he says, “Rose got rid of your charges without blemishing your name any further, and for that I can’t thank her enough. She eats, doesn’t she? I’m sending her an invitation.”

And that’s why, on the last Friday night of her summer break, Luisa has finally found a way to get Rose up into _her_ room for a change.

In the few hours before the party’s set to start, Luisa is busy tidying said room. It shouldn’t matter, and she tries to tell herself it’s because she doesn’t want Rose to trip over a stray hula hoop or a pair of roller skates if they’re too busy making-out to see where they’re going.

Her room’s a mess. She has long ago _forbidden_ housekeeping to come in and clean it up for her, because things always go missing afterwards; masterfully-hidden bottles of booze stashed away for a rainy day, a few joints she had been saving, and a collection of porn magazines had all, somehow, been thrown in the trash.

And she knew her father had paid them extra to get all ‘bad’ stuff out of her room, but she liked her privacy and so she had promised her father she would only grow exponentially worse if he didn’t let her live her goddamn life.

He had.

There’s no point in keeping it organized though, because now she’s barely ever here anymore. She is always out, treating Miami like her playground. Sleeping at someone else’s place, in someone else’s bed is infinitely preferential.

She doesn’t invite people around to the Marbella very often. Not many people know she’s a Solano at all. But Rose knows—and so Rose gets to be the exception. Rose gets to see something none of her lovers ever have.

Home.

After she has made the best of a _really bad_ bed room situation, Luisa gets showered and dressed into an army green dress with open back and flattering cleavage that she has been saving for just this occasion. As she makes two little braids in her hair to keep it out of her face, she keeps looking into the mirror—and she’s fairly sure Rose is going to appreciate the dress.

She is fashionably late, even if she only had to take an elevator nine floors down. The majority of the invited two hundred guests seem to be loitering in the lobby already. Loud chatter floats off of them; she can hear it before the elevator doors slide open.

Rafael and her father are standing in the middle of the space, where the mass of people is the thickest, and they seem plenty occupied to not notice her going around looking for someone else.

Every flash of red is Rose, but they aren’t until it is. Rose is leaning casually against a pillar, flute of champagne in hand, and lights up instantly when their eyes meet.

“Luisa, hey.”

She receives a kiss to the cheek for her efforts, so she rolls her eyes and drags Rose _behind_ the pillar, where they’re mostly obstructed from view. There she demands a proper greeting. If anyone notices that Rose Ruvelle, the defense attorney, is being kissed the fuck out of by Emilio Solano’s daughter, no one talks about it.

Luisa pulls back with a smirk, licking Rose’s lip gloss off her lips. “You’re looking mighty dapper today, babe.”

She really does, with her crisp white button-down and skirt. Luisa is a particular fan of the bow tie with red roses printed all across it, looped beneath her collar. There are at least a dozen things she can think of doing with Rose and a tie.

Leaning up on her toes, she hooks her finger beneath it and tugs Rose closer with it. “You’re so cheeky. And I thought the towels with the roses stitched into the hem were the worst you could do.”

Rose huffs. “I like roses. They’re beautiful.” She smiles as she kisses Luisa once more. “Just like you.”

“You did _not_ just compare me to roses. Jesus fucking Christ, you’re cheesy.” But Luisa is smiling, and she hooks her arms back around Rose’s neck to kiss her again, and not a single part of her cares that she has fallen for such a cliché line.

When they _finally_ put more than a few feet of distance between them, several minutes have passed and their hair is a lot less neat and stylized than it was before. Luisa toys with one of her braids as she leans back, looking up at Rose from an angle, mouth formed into a half-smirk that she used to practice in the mirror.

“Dad wants to talk to you, so the sooner you do that, the less we’ll have to hide. He will stop looking for you after he has thanked you a few times for, ah… ‘ _helping my daughter with her legal woes. Luisa can be a_ bit _of a handful’._ ” Her voice drops to mimic her father’s, and her smirk grows when Rose rolls her eyes at the last part.

“You’re more than a _bit_ of a handful, Lu,” Rose whispers, kissing her one last time before stepping aside and back into view. “But I like it that way.”

Luisa stays put for a while, takes the time to reply to unread text messages (she sees she missed one from Rose, asking her where she was), and when she’s sure no one will connect her to Rose, appears from around the pillar too. There are some people looking vaguely in her direction, but she’s sure none of them would have the balls to imagine the two of them together, anyway.

She makes her way into the crowd, to accept greetings here and skillfully dodge people she has slept with but never called back there, until she has made a sufficient enough appearance at her own end-of-summer-celebration that she can slink off and do something more fun than talk to extended family she doesn’t care about and her father’s business associates’ offspring she never quite befriended.

After one last look around, she vanishes to the bar, where Rafael’s got his hands up the dress of a girl Luisa recognizes and a bottle of champagne already sits uncorked on the counter behind them.

“You sharing?” Luisa smiles at Petra, who obviously hasn’t forgotten the night they spent together because her cheeks turn a flaming red, and then snatches the bottle up and pours them all a glass. “I can’t wait for _our_ friends to arrive.”

They always do as soon as the dinner part of the dinner party starts to wind down, because the party part is the important one, anyway. Luisa has made some of her best memories during these evenings—and she also got the most consistent gap in her memory for one of these evenings.

It promises to be a good time all-around.

They clink their glasses together and start sipping together, but Luisa has always been a fast drinker and going to college has only worsened it, even if she wasn’t _supposed_ to be drinking much anymore after that first AA-meeting.

Fuck the rules, right?

“Where’s your girlfriend?” Rafael asks as he follows suit in emptying his glass. “I thought you’d be all over her.”

“Yeah right. She’s all over _me_.” Luisa rolls her eyes and refills their glasses. Petra is still slowly sipping hers, unsure who to look at. “She’s talking to dad. I’m waiting for the moment when they all pretend to be good parents by turning their backs on us so they can’t see us behave like monkeys.”

Rafael clinks his glass to hers once more. “Cheers to that.”

The bar is separated from the lobby with a thin wall, so when the guests are ushered away like a herd towards the terrace, they pick up on the change of sound immediately. Luisa casts a sad look at the half of the bottle they haven’t gotten to yet, but she’s sure she can finesse at least _one_ waiter into serving her alcohol despite her father’s explicit wishes.

“Come.” She hooks an arm through Petra’s and the other through Rafael’s. “It’s time for dinner.”

* * *

The decorators have outdone themselves once more. The terrace has been stuffed full of enough tables to seat all the guests, yet it doesn’t look crowded at all. They have strung up lights above and put vases of wonderfully beautiful lilies at irregular interval, breaking the symmetry to make it look much cozier.

There are waiters walking between the tables in only fluid motions, seemingly unbothered by the significant increase in people present to be served, and Luisa waves at one of the girls she used to have a satisfactory friendship with. The wink she gets in return is enough confirmation that she won't be the only one to go through the night sober.

“Dad,” she exclaims chipper as she finds the table in the center where her father is already seated with the woman he is hoping to wife down next, as well as several of his closest friends, and Rose. Luisa places a kiss on top of her father’s shiny bald head and quickly claims the place next to Rose before anyone else can beat her to it.

Luisa does her best to smile innocently. “Rose, how nice to see you here! How’s the office been?”

“Luisa,” Rose hums in response, folding her hands beneath her chin to allow her gaze to remain steadily on her. “It’s definitely been quiet without you around, and my co-workers are grumpy to have to get their own lunches and coffees, but it’s been great otherwise.”

“Glad to hear it.” Luisa curled a lock of hair around her finger and licked her lips slowly. “Wouldn’t want you to miss me too much.”

“Good hands are always missed.”

Luisa cocks her head a little. “Exactly how good a hand was I?”

Rose’s answer is lost in the sudden din of noise. Oh right. The dancers.

There is always some sort of entertainment present, and Luisa knew there would be dancers this year, performing some crazy tricks with fire while busting out moves. She remembers a night she danced with fire, too. Good memories.

The waitress finally gets around to their table and slides a flask of something into her hand. Her fingers linger for a moment, squeeze at her wrist, and then she disappears to take orders from everyone else. Luisa tries to think of her name, but it has slipped from her mind and she doesn’t really care anymore, anyway.

Rose is looking at her with a laser focus.

“Don’t be jealous,” Luisa whispers softly, leaning over her seat and closer to Rose’s to brush her fingers against the outside of the woman’s thigh. She chuckles softly when she feels the muscles tense beneath her touch. “I’m all about you now.”

“I wasn’t—that’s not—” Rose huffs instead of finishing her rebuttal and pries the flask from Luisa’s grip, to take a swig herself. “I was just curious.”

“Hey, I don’t share!”

Rose gives her such a sharp look then, before she lets a smile soften her expression up again. “Neither do I.”

* * *

Dinner is dinner. The food is good, the alcohol is better, and Luisa makes so many veiled innuendos that Rose choked on something (sip, bite, breath) no less than _seven_ times. It’s a personal record for her. But the best thing about dinner is that it passes by swiftly, and two hours later most of the old, responsible people have either completely vacated the outside section or have drifted to the outskirts of it, near the outside bar.

Luisa tugs Rose upright and tangles their hands together. “Ready to see some magic happen?”

The magic is this: in a matter of minutes it looks like they’ve been at a frat party all night. People are pouring in—she sees a whole bunch of people that go to the University of Miami with her—and tables are shoved aside to form a dance floor.

Waiters roll out kegs and ice boxes full of drinks, led by Rafael who tries to make it all slot perfectly into place.

“And the greatest fucking part is that no one here is going to care that I’m dancing with an older woman.” Luisa looks smug as she says it and spins Rose around at the same time, before pulling her close and hooking her arms around the woman’s waist. “They might be a little jealous, but I’d be jealous of me too.”

Rose smiles brightly and lets herself be swayed for a moment, then stills and leans forward to whisper in Luisa’s ear. “I thought you said something about showing me your room yesterday?” And the way she _purrs_ those words, yeah, there’s no way Luisa is going to stay.

The party will still be there when they’re done.

Luisa tugs Rose along by the hand, fingers clasped tightly around the other’s still, and can’t help but giggle like a child as she drags her much older, respectable, successful lawyer lover through the lobby and towards the elevators like they’re teenagers sneaking away to make-out in secret.

Well, that’s pretty much what they’re about to do, so it works.

She backs Rose into the corner of the elevator as soon as the doors swish closed and kisses her with all the pent-up desire of a two-hour-dinner spent trying to turn the other on with just her words. Rose always gives as good as she gets.

“Which floor?” Rose mumbles some (four, ten, hundred?) kisses later when they still haven’t ascended at all, still resting at ground level. “Unless you want me to fuck you in the elevator?”

Luisa shudders a sigh. “I’ll fuck _you_ in an elevator,” she casts back, but she reaches for the buttons and punches the one to the tenth floor regardless. “Some other time. When it isn’t high season.”

They pad through the desolated hallways. These rooms are VIPs only—her father’s is around the corner, Rafael’s across from hers and three doors down. Some are rented out to high-profile guests, but none in this particular part, and regardless Luisa knows none will be around right now.

No one that can bring word back to Emilio that Luisa brought none other than Rose Ruvelle up to her room.

But instead of resuming their wild, passionate (and kind of desperate) making-out, Rose comes to a halt just inside the room and looks at all the light touches. Luisa closes the door gently and watches Rose taking her room in.

It’s almost as big as Rose’s apartment. The walls are that ugly blue-ish grey that all the rooms on this floor have, but the door between her bedroom and the living room/kitchen area is open and thin, white curtains flutter with the wind coming in from the balcony.

Most of her furniture is white; couch, bookshelves, chairs. But she has added colorful swatches of fabric everywhere and she has chucked out the standard decorations (actually chucked them _off_ her balcony and into the pool) to make place for a wall full of pictures, souvenirs and keepsakes. There’s a guitar in a stand and a drum set in the corner where used to be a tall vase, and there’s a name sign in the middle of her glass table.

The name sign says ‘ _Rose Ruvelle_ ’ and she stole it on her last day. Rose bellows a laugh, louder and more genuine than Luisa can remember her ever laughing before, as she picks it up and examines it. “So that’s where that went.”

“Wanted a souvenir from a _great_ learning experience,” Luisa says as she drops herself onto the couch and rests her head on her arm, watching Rose upside down. She’s still hot, though.

Rose continues further into the room, to inspect her instruments up close. “When you said you’d quit piano,” she begins, fingers trailing delicately up a set of strings. “I thought music just wasn’t for you. They let you use these in the hotel?”

“My room’s... a little more soundproofed than most others.” Luisa winks when Rose looks up at her. “Daddy realized they were here to stay, so he had this room prepped to contain my noise.”

“Will you teach me?”

Luisa rolls off the couch and joins Rose in front of her babies. She never wants real ones, can’t even stand being near them, but she does feel maternal and it’s about these two beautiful instruments. “Which one?”

Rose’s reply is instant. “Guitar.” There’s something gleaming in her eyes, a look that Luisa has had directed at her already. It’s not desire, but it’s close. Just for that look, Luisa would do it. How Rose is going to thank her is only a small thought at the back of her mind.

She has to drag the amplifier out, plug the guitar in and tune it, but it only takes a few minutes. Rose sits down cross-legged and watches Luisa work, interrupts her only for a moment to tuck her hair behind her ear and let her thumb drag across her jaw.

Luisa ignores the shivers as good as she can.

“Okay, take this.” She hoists the strap of the guitar over Rose’s head and settles the guitar in her lap, then shuffles to sit behind her and slide her arms up against hers. “So, you place your fingers like this…”

Luisa has a lot of time to think while she guides Rose through the motions of playing guitar, of how to move her hand up the neck of the guitar and how to hold a chord and how to pick at strings with her fingers, because she could play completely blind if she wanted.

It’s near enough, with her face against Rose’s shoulder, cheek resting against a thick mop of the most beautiful red hair.

And she thinks that this is nice. She is physically close to Rose, but not for a sexual reason. There’s a warmth between them, and she can’t help but smile so much, and she feels so _proud_ when Rose manages to play a few notes.

Just like she has never really shown her room to anyone other than friends and family, she has never shared _this_. She wouldn’t even teach Rafael when he asked—but that was mostly because he was twelve and she didn’t trust him to leave her baby whole.

There’s noise coming from behind her and down, the party raging on without them, and Luisa finds she would be fine not going back at all, to just enjoy the unfamiliarity of a quiet, peaceful moment in her life shared with someone else.

Usually she can’t be quiet and peaceful around other people at all.

“You’re a natural,” she mumbles, lips touching to the back of Rose’s shoulder as she eases her arms down to rest, instead, between Rose’s belly and the guitar. “If you practiced I’m sure you’d get good at it quickly.”

“I have a good teacher.”

“I don’t think it would be very _ethical_ of me to sleep with my student though,” Luisa hums thoughtfully, and Rose laughs again, and she feels so good in that moment.

And while Rose keeps trying, Luisa keeps thinking. And maybe the thought crosses her mind that she has been missing out on something all this time.

Luisa doesn’t know how much time passes before they finally get off the floor, but enough for her ass to have gone numb and her legs to ache a little as she stands upright. Rose turns to her with such brightness in her eyes though that it doesn’t fucking matter.

“I don’t remember the last time I did something for fun,” she whispers even though they’re alone, hiding from no one at all. Her hands cup around Luisa’s face and before she can complain—as if she would—she’s being kissed breathless.

She could get used to that.

“How about the last time you did _me_?” Luisa mutters as soon as her mouth is free. “That’s just rude.”

“You know what I mean. I’m always working, never take time for myself. It’s actually all because of you that I’ve begun to realize that.” Rose sits down on the couch instead of heading for the bedroom, so Luisa sits herself in Rose’s lap and rests her head against Rose’s collarbone.

This conversation is _serious_. The only way she can have it is if she doesn’t have to look at Rose while she’s doing it—then it becomes too intimate for her to bear and she’ll _definitely_ bolt; she knows herself well.

“So why do you work so much?” Luisa asks, fingers sliding through red hair a few times before she decides to braid it. Rose would look so cute with braids. “Is it because you didn’t have anyone to come home to?”

Rose holds her gently and doesn’t complain that Luisa isn’t looking at her, and she appreciates both those things. “This was my parents’ legacy. I couldn’t stand it if I ran their life’s work into the ground.”

“Oh.” Luisa drops the locks from her fingers and tilts her head up to look at Rose. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know.”

“No? I thought you would’ve Googled me for sure. You’re a child of this generation after all.”

Luisa still feels a little uncomfortable at suddenly knowing such intimate knowledge of Rose, but humor always works wonders to cover that up. “I did, but I was only interested in the pictures.”

Blue eyes seem to search her, and Luisa hopes she has pushed everything deep down enough. She really wasn’t made for serious conversations, but at least she _tried_. Now there’s an uncomfortable scratching in her chest though, like she has swallowed nails and they’re tearing through her organs.

In an attempt to steer the conversation back to where she’s comfortable, she digs up her phone and unlocks it (there’s a photo of the two of them as her background and she sees Rose notice it, sees her regain a bright smile). “Do you feel like anything special? I’m bringing the party up here, you and me.”

Rose taps her finger against her bottom lip as she thinks (Luisa wants to kiss her). “We did skip dessert. Do you like ice cream?”

“I love ice cream.”

* * *

Luisa can’t sleep. Rose is naked beside her in bed, her red curls sprawled around her, an arm underneath the pillow. She started out tucked into Luisa’s side, but since she can’t sleep she has been tossing and turning. She has now finally given up and sits upright.

Her companion doesn’t wake up.

Her phone tells her it’s only a little past midnight. There are a few dozen text messages in her inbox from people who had expected her downstairs at the party. She rubs a hand through her hair and texts only one back.

00:10 am, Luisa: _‘party still going?’_

She picks her underwear and bra off the floor and has them back on (she’s as fast at dressing as she is at undressing) before she’s crossed the room to her walk-in closet. Navigating by phone light, as to not wake up Rose, she picks an outfit together of black jeans and a maroon tank top.

By the time she has her jacket on, there’s finally a text back.

00:19 am, Max: _‘we @ barry’s.’_

She doesn’t feel great about leaving Rose like this, but she already gets too little sleep as is. There’s no point in Luisa waking her up with her constant moving, or to wake her up so she can get rid of all the energy still fizzing inside her.

This is the better option, she tells herself as she slips out of her room and ever so quietly closes the door behind her.

The hotel is quiet, but the ground level looks like a tornado has passed through. _Poor night crew_. She steals (is it stealing if your father owns the hotel?) a bottle of flavored vodka from behind the bar so she can catch up on the way and gives Max a quick call to tell her she’ll be there in ten.

 _Barracuda_ (lovingly nicknamed _Barry’s_ by some junior from U of Miami more than a decade ago) is their pub. It’s close to their campus, cheap, and the owner has a thing for Luisa (who doesn’t, honestly), so they’re guaranteed a great time and a lot of freebies.

Luisa chooses the route along the pier. It never gets dark and quiet in this part of Miami; the bars, clubs and restaurants lining the beach fill the air with lights and music. She loves it here. Here she doesn’t have to be anyone but a girl looking for fun; she isn’t Emilio Solano’s heir and bane of his existence, she isn’t the daughter of the crazy woman that threw herself off a bridge, she isn’t a student or a girlfriend or a friend.

She just _is_.

Drops of liquid spill across the neck of the bottle and trace across her fingers before dripping into the still hot sand. She needs to drink faster if she wants this polished off before she gets to Barry’s. It goes fast after she’s a quarter into it.

She passes a group of guys hanging out by the railing overlooking the sea and they holler at her, cheer and shout and whistle when they see her chug more than her skinny frame and her weight should be supposed to handle.

“Luisa!” Max, in all her pink-haired and pierced glory, shouts for whole the bar to hear and just as quickly she’s swept up in arms and hugs, ushered into their usual booth, handed over a cocktail that looks a radioactive green. “Time to catch up, babe.”

She doesn’t have it in her to tell them that she already did, because Carter is hanging over the bench and pounding his fist on the neighboring table to alert Irene, the middle-aged owner who owns Luisa’s heart, in a platonic way because if not, Luisa would’ve eloped with her a long time ago.

“Alright, but if you guys put something in this drink, I’m not going to stop myself from projectile vomiting all over you.”

Max slings an arm across her shoulders and pulls Luisa into her side. “That’s my girl.”

She’s their girl. The one that chugs alcohol like a champ, that proposes they go skinny dipping in the sea because it’s way too hot and it’s their last weekend of the summer and they should be feeling more _alive_.

 _I shouldn’t do this_ , she still thinks, because the last time she was this drunk she got herself into this whole mess to begin with. But her thoughts don’t stick around long. There’s too much else happening, an overwhelming assault on all her senses, and she stops thinking about repercussions and rules and Rose.

She just stops thinking altogether.

* * *

It’s bright out when she makes the walk of shame through the city, squinting her eyes shut against the sun burning through her eyeballs. She woke up on the beach snuggled between Max and Allison, clothes damp against her skin and the taste of salt water in her mouth.

She’s lost her phone, which she thinks she should care about more than the little she does, and her sunglasses, which is a real fucking bitch when you live in Miami.

When she scratches in her hair, sand falls down around her face.

She remembers only flashes of last night. She remembers dancing with Carter, her big, goofy, pothead best friend, and she remembers not even bothering to take her clothes off as she ran straight at the sea. She remembers Irene coming out to join them with a few bottles in tow and she remembers—nothing after that.

It’s not the first time she has a black-out, but a little voice keeps nagging at her that there’s something really important she should be thinking about.

Some staff members at the hotel smile politely at her, some others pretend not to see her pass through at all. She flips off the one guy behind the desk that she can’t stand but would usually ignore, then slumps against the wall of the elevator and lets the machine lift her up to her floor.

And then it comes to her.

 _Rose_.

Shit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dun dun dun.  
> I know, that ending isn't fair of me. Then again, I never said I would be fair. Muahaha.
> 
> Thank you for reading!


	4. would you please have mercy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you're all enjoying the wicked ride that this story has been. I've been having a lot of fun writing it, at least, and the Luisa in this AU has literally become my baby.  
> I'll miss her when this story is over.
> 
> Hope you enjoy reading!

Bright sunlight filters in through blue lace curtains and Rose wants to chuck a pillow at life to make it go away. She hasn’t been home long; a look at a phone with a dangerously low battery level tells her it’s just after noon, so it’s only been a few hours of sleep for her.

She had woken up in the middle of the night to find the space in bed next to her empty, the whole room empty except for her. She had tripped over herself to get dressed and start looking, and it had felt like being off-kilter the whole search through.

There had been a brief moment of relief when she hadn’t found Luisa in the bar of the hotel, only for a wave of all-consuming concern to slam into her. If Luisa wasn’t here, that left all of Miami for her to check out—all of the world; she wouldn’t put it past Luisa to skip state.

She had driven around the city looking until, around eight am, she had gotten the call.

_“Hello, is this Rose Ruvelle?”_

_“Yes, this is she.”_

_“It’s Rafael Solano. Luisa’s brother? I got your number off your website.”_

_“Is she okay?” Rose trembles, clenching the phone so tight it creaks. “She disappeared and I’ve been so worried—”_

_“She’s fine. She told me to call you before she crashed. Luisa... she does this thing often. She disappears when she drinks. But she’s okay.”_

_“Thank you, Rafael.”_

She had gone home and back to sleep after that, but her sleep hasn’t been fitful and now, at the brightest point of the day, there is no way for her to try and get some more. She plugs her phone into a charger and forces herself to get up and stop acting like a child.

The shower takes some of the miserable exhaustion out of her, but there is still a cold void inside her that can’t be washed away. It remembers what it was like to fear the worst, because Luisa is a girl of extremes. She accepts only the worst and the best.

She tries to get the images that haunted her all through her search to disappear from her mind, but they won’t budge now that she’s called them into existence. Luisa lost forever. Luisa broken. Luisa dead.

Rose slides down to the floor of her shower cabin and pulls her knees up to her chest. She sits there long after the water has turned cold.

There are no texts or calls that day, and there aren’t any the days after that either. Rose tries to reach Luisa several times on Saturday, tries when she wakes up on Sunday and before she goes to sleep. By Monday she has convinced herself that this is it. They’re done.

She is a pale, stoic figure at work. She doesn’t smile, doesn’t chat with anyone. Rose just wants to pour herself into work and forget about herself. Law is a great way to do that; reading American legislature offers her a chance to distance herself from the woman that is aching and bleeding on the inside.

But it’s draining and when she wakes up on Thursday, she can’t make herself get up and go to work another day, go through the motions and try to function when all she wants to do is curl in on herself and keep herself from crumbling.

She hasn’t ever fallen this fast. Five weeks was all it takes for Luisa to make it happen, but it isn’t surprising because it’s _Luisa_ , and even now, in pain, Rose can’t think about her in any other way than utterly poetic.

She also hasn’t felt like she is falling apart since her parents passed.

So she indulges herself and takes the day off. It isn’t long before Victoria’s standing in her living room, abusing the key she was given to invite herself in and butt into Rose’s life.

But that’s Vic.

“I’m relieved that you and your girlfriend aren’t naked on your living room floor. That would be really awkward,” she says as she looks around. “Where is she, anyway?”

“Why would she be here?” Rose huffs and sounds so bitter when she says it that she doesn’t recognize her own voice for a second. She never sounds like that. She has always been so good at keeping emotion out of her voice, or putting it there to get her point across; being a lawyer is a little like being an actress and she’s damn good at it.

But she can’t hide that she’s hurting.

“Oh my.” Vic slides the files in her arms onto the coffee table and sits down next to Rose. “When you didn’t show up for work I thought for sure it was her doing. I’ve seen you do so many things since you’ve met her that you’ve never done before, and skipping work…” She trails off, then looks at Rose more closely and a corner of her mouth pulls down in sympathy. “What happened?”

“I think we’re done.”

“Oh, sweetheart.” She is enveloped in a hug that’s both warming and stuffs her mouth full of her friend’s springy blonde curls, but she slackens into the embrace and lets Victoria soothe her for a moment. Then she pushes away and stares ahead, at where the movie she’d been watching is still playing.

“I think I did something she didn’t like. Expected too much or—or tried to make this serious when it’s not—” She shrugs helplessly and curls into Victoria’s side. “She has been ignoring me.”

“Oh my god. Rose, are you—” She faux-gasps, as dramatic as you would expect from someone who does theater in her free time. “You are feeling _sorry_ for yourself. My god, that’s an ugly look on you.”

Rose is forced to look up in kind but stern eyes and a mouth that’s set in a determined, pursed line. “I don’t know why I need to remind you, but if I must then I shall: you’re _Rose Ruvelle_. I haven’t seen you lose a single fight that you set your mind to. How are you letting yourself get kicked in the ass like a little girl— _by_ a little girl.”

She has to smile and it feels good to finally be able to do that again.

Her best friend just waltzes on ahead though. She can deliver some impressive monologues sometimes. “She’s _good_ for you, and you’re good for her. She needs someone like you, you know? Child’s so lost. So, what you’re going to do is you’re going to summon that trademark Rose Ruvelle fire, and you’re going to go get your girl.”

“Okay, okay. _Fine_.” Rose pulls Victoria down to face level and kisses her on the forehead. “Thank you. Now _go_.”

Vic grins, gets up and takes a bow. Then she holds up a finger. “One more thing... Are you _seriously_ watching _High School Musical_ without me?”

“Get out!”

* * *

With a little help from Rafael and a trip down to her storage space, she is ready to get herself back into Luisa’s good graces. She might be stupid for trying so hard with a girl that doesn’t seem like she wants anything serious, or doesn’t seem interested anymore now that the challenge has faded, but Rose won’t just let this die out without trying.

And she knows just the way to shake Luisa out of whatever stubborn spell she’s currently in.

Rose loves cars. She doesn’t have to drive often, so her sleek grey convertible is fine for Miami. But she has splurged many times in the past, all that money catching dust on her bank accounts only amounting to so much joy in her life, and this is one of them.

Her matte black Lamborghini Aventador is objectively a beauty. She knows Luisa won’t be able to resist.

It’s a supercar—it feels like flying as she tears up the roads beneath her tires and speeds towards the center of the city, to the intersection near the main campus of the University of Miami where she’s asked Luisa to meet her. There are aviator glasses on her nose, she’s wearing her favorite red dress, and she doesn’t feel as pathetic as she did this morning.

Hearing the car purr as she chases it through the city feels cathartic.

Luisa’s eyes go comically wide when the car pulls up right in front of her. Then she does a double take as the wing door slides up and Rose gets out, with practiced ease despite the tightness of her dress and her ten inches high heels.

This occurs every time she takes this car out for a spin, so she isn’t surprised when three seconds after getting out, a man on the opposite street corner hollers: “Hey baby, your husband know you driving his car?”

His friend laughs like that’s the funniest thing he’s ever heard and adds: “Don’t scratch up what your man worked so hard for, sweetheart.”

But never before has she been able to reply with as big of a fuck you as she can do now. Rose ignores them, walks around to Luisa, maneuvers her up against the hood of the Lambo, and kisses her. A bunch of students goes absolutely wild on the lawns; the two men are blissfully silent.

“Get in, Lu,” she murmurs against Luisa’s mouth, grinning softly to herself at both the situation and that Luisa kissed her _back_. “We’re going shopping.”

“I’m waiting here for Raf.” Then she rolls her eyes. “He isn’t coming, is he?”

“No, he isn’t. Sorry for tricking you into seeing me.”

Luisa grins. “Are you kidding me? I’m so impressed.”

It isn’t until they’re in the car that Rose gets a proper chance to look at Luisa and— _fuck_. She looks like such an asshole with a loose grey tank top that shows a significant bit of her sides, flannel shirt tied around her waist, frayed jean cut-offs and barely laced boots but she pulls the look off _incredibly_ well.

The snapback on top of her head gives it that last bit of cheekiness that pushes her right to frat boy levels of arrogance.

Oh how Rose has missed her.

“Are we really going shopping?” Luisa asks. While Rose is checking her out, _she_ is checking out the car, fingers sliding over leather upholstery and across the roof of the car. She releases a sound of pure glee when Rose fires up the engine again.

The car shivers with unlimited power at their disposal.

“Yes, but first we’re going for a drive.”

Rose goes fast. She can’t stand to break rules and speed limits, but she pushes as far as she can legally go and once they leave the city and get on a long stretch of road along the coast that is completely empty, she _floors_ the gas.

If she felt like flying earlier, she doesn’t know what this is.

On her left is a blur of yellows and blues, the ocean nothing more than an impression of color and salt air. On her right, Luisa is having the time of her life. She has her window rolled down and clenches her hat in her hands so the wind can ruffle through her hair.

Rose wishes she wasn’t driving so she could look at Luisa instead.

She indulges herself for that wish some ten minutes later when she comes across an empty lot, starting to become overgrown with weeds. She isn’t sure what was supposed to be built here, but some projects flop before they’re fulfilled and she’s glad for a chance to pull over.

The sun is blinding, scorching against her skin, so she puts her back to it and looks at Luisa instead.

And in that moment she knows she isn’t falling in love—she already has. Luisa looks exhilarated, a bright wide look in her eyes, her mouth open as she throws her arms in the air and spins in place.

Laughing, she bounds up to Rose and just about flings herself into her arms. “You _have_ to let me drive this fucking car.”

Rose forgets about the days spent in agony, about Luisa running out on her in the middle of the night to go on a bender, and revels in this moment out in the sunshine, the girl she likes in her arms. When she bends to kiss Luisa, the girl reaches up to meet her halfway, her arms sliding up around her neck.

This isn’t the talk she had in mind. She isn’t even sure if she wants to have it now that things feel like they used to, like nothing ever happened.

Maybe she shouldn’t have the talk at all and just enjoy this, even if she will always want _more_. She’d rather have this than nothing at all.

“I missed you,” Luisa murmurs as she moves her hands down to cup Rose’s ass. Her whole entire face smirks, because she is a smirking asshole—and Rose is _so_ into it. “Let me show you.”

* * *

The backseat of her Lamborghini should have been too cramped for it, but Luisa managed to sprawl her out across it regardless and fucked her so hard she can't feel her legs now.

So there’s nothing to do but let Luisa drive them back.

Rose is resting heavily into the passenger’s seat, still unable to do much. Luisa already knows, after only such a short time, exactly how to edge her until she comes so hard it feels like she’s imploding. There is no word for how arrogant Luisa became in that moment; the last bits of it still cling to her smile.

Luisa starts out driving wild and reckless, much like Rose expected. She puts a foot like lead down on the gas and when they snap forward their belts slam into their chests. After that she’s much more gentle, easing the car into first gear, second gear, third gear. In no time they’re cruising back the way they came and just as fast.

Rose picks up the discarded hat off the floor of her car and puts it up on her own head.

“Looks good on you,” Luisa hums, looking sideways only very briefly (thank god for that). “So, shopping?”

“Yes. I want you to help me choose my outfit for this function I have to go to next week. And, if you’ll go with me, pick one for yourself too.” That was casual, right? Rose had wanted to invite Luisa along to it ever since she had gotten the invitation two weeks ago, but after the past few days she hadn’t been sure if she should.

To her total surprise, Luisa grins and nods. “Sounds fun.”

Rose wishes her whole life could be like this: driving her quarter million dollars car along the coastline of a state she has been in love with since she got here, with a girl by her side that makes her smile but also keeps her on her toes, not even thinking about work once or all the things she’s meant to be doing.

She doesn’t live in the moment very often, but she is doing so now. With Luisa, every moment is a gift, not a given, and she’ll have to learn to enjoy them while they last.

Luisa slows down once they enter the city proper and steers them towards the center, where boutiques line broad avenues and your credit card starts hurting from just looking at price tags. Good thing Rose has more than one.

They pass in and out of stores, looking around, goofing off together, and Rose might never be able to return to some of them but it’s well worth the ache in her cheeks from smiling so much and the sticky heat trapped between their held hands.

She settles on a suit for herself (Luisa made a very convincing argument) and a dress for Luisa, colors more or less matching. They’ll both look way too great to be at a dinner with a bunch of lawyers, but what else is new?

“Do you want to go back to my place?” This time Rose holds on tight to her set of keys and shoos Luisa away to the other side of the car. “We could order in dinner and make up for all that lost time.”

“Ah, I can’t.”

Rose has done it. She has already ruined it before it’s full and well started up again. But before her thoughts can spiral, Luisa puts her fingers around Rose’s chin to drag her towards her. “I already have plans. But another time?”

“Definitely.”

They kiss for... a really long time, her back against her car, Luisa pressing her against it. People pass them by, remarks are thrown their way, but Rose can’t care less. It’s the twenty-first century, they should be more accepting anyway.

She feels a little light-headed when they finally break apart for real, Luisa shuffling back as to not just go back in and say ‘screw it’. Rose so wants her to say ‘screw it’.

“Thank you for the dress. And the _ride_. You definitely should pick me up from school more often.”

“Anytime.”

“Oh babe, that’s a dangerous word.” Luisa plucks the hat off Rose’s head and slides it back on top of her own, kisses Rose one last time for good measure, then walks backwards until she’s on the pavement. “I’ll see you. And I’ll text you.”

She means it though. Rose receives four text messages before she has gotten home. The last one is just a car emoji and a heart-eyes emoji.

How does she have feelings for such an _idiot_?

* * *

Rose is a little sad she isn’t spending her evening with Luisa like she had hoped, but at least this way she can make up for missing a day of work. She can’t believe she would be so terribly unprofessional. Yet a smile forces its way to her face, because today was wonderful and she can’t regret her decision at all.

She is stretched out on her couch in panties and a Harvard shirt, a laptop in her lap and some movie running in the background. Maybe she’ll take a page out of Luisa’s book and do something surprising tonight, like opening a bottle of wine just for her or renting a movie she _actually_ wants to see, but she’s still pondering that when noise from the hallway interrupts her work flow.

There have been children in the building before. She knows one of the tenants on the floor below her is divorced and only sometimes gets to see his kids every once in a while. Sixth-graders are so _loud_.

But they don’t usually knock on her door.

When she opens the door, though, it isn’t a cute little boy wondering why his father isn’t the one opening up. It’s a smiling Luisa, holding up a bottle of champagne in one hand and, for some reason, a sombrero in the other.

“We were in the neighborhood,” she says instead of greeting and rolls her eyes fondly when people holler from downstairs. “You feel like going out clubbing with us?”

“Clubbing?” Rose has never been the type. She liked get-togethers fine, liked going to bars or house parties, but clubs have always seemed daunting and uncomfortable to her. _But_ , she has never had Luisa with her.

There’s a rush of footsteps up the staircases and then two college-aged people step into her line of sight. A girl with bubblegum pink, spiky hair and electric grey eyes springs out immediately. The boy with ratty, shoulder-length blonde hair is a bit more understated.

“Dude, Lu, _this_ is Rose? She’s fucking hot.”

“She can hear you, _fucknut_ ,” Luisa casts back, corner of her mouth pulling down slightly. “I told you guys to wait downstairs.”

“Well, sucks to be you, dude,” the girl says with a shrug of her shoulders. Then the girl turns towards her and Rose can’t hide her smile at these antics fast enough. “Pardon your girlfriend’s terrible manners. Will you come with us, though? She’ll be fucking worthless all night if you don’t.”

She isn’t sure if it’s the _girlfriend_ that does it or the idea that Luisa might have as lousy a time without her as is the case for herself, but she nods her agreement. “Just let me get into something else quickly.”

Luisa slips inside before the door closes and starts smirking as soon as her eyes settle on what Rose is wearing—or rather what she _isn’t_ wearing. “Oh, did we interrupt something? Maybe we can let them wait outside a little longer.”

Her friends start whining like puppies on the other side of the door though, indicating that they’re listening _in_. This is so not the opportunity to explore if they’re into exhibitionism.

Rose swats Luisa’s eager hands away from her thighs. “Wait here.”

Luisa leans back against the wall and sighs overly loud. “Fine. But you’re _no fun_. And,” her smirk grows just a little scary. “I’ll pay you back for presuming to give me an order.”

Rose tries to ignore the throb between her legs as she changes out of her shirt and into the only little black dress she owns, which isn’t _that_ little—she’s just tall. She grabs a clutch purse, stuffs it with her necessities, and joins Luisa back in the hall.

When she left, Luisa was wearing just a regular jeans and a shirt. Now she has knotted the shirt beneath her breasts to show off her flat, tan stomach and a belt lies on the floor, so now her jeans hang low on her hips and show just a sliver of the waistband of her boy shorts.

She really should not have tried to give Luisa command.

“I win,” the girl exclaims and follows it up with a victory dance as the boy hands over a twenty-dollar-bill. “I knew Luisa wasn’t going to fuck you now. She’s _obviously_ going to wait until we’re at the club.”

Rose doesn’t know what the two friends fist-bumping means, but she’s sure she’s going to die tonight regardless.

The girl is Max, the boy is Carter, and they’re actually a really friendly and funny bunch. Rose thought maybe they were the same people that Luisa got in trouble with before, but that notion gets erased really fast.

They also try really hard to include her, by explaining inside jokes and always adding enough information that she can follow conversations about school. And they ask _her_ questions. Ask if she’s all that Luisa has told them about her (that she’s older, a successful lawyer, rich and hot). Rose blushes a little, and that mostly because Luisa _talks_ about her. To her friends.

“Those are all correct,” she says and Carter laughs so hard that he trips over himself and falls to the ground. When she helps him up, because Max and Luisa are now both laughing too, he gives her a hug and tells her that they’re friends now.

Rose knows a pothead when she sees one, but she also knows a kind person when she sees one; Carter is both. She doesn’t care why he smokes. He seems like he’s a good influence on Luisa and she can appreciate that.

She also likes him already.

The club they have chosen is in downtown Miami and the neon lights attached to the front light up the whole block. It’s almost fully dark, though it never gets pitch black around these parts, so the pinks and reds and blues are bright and blinding.

Inside is a headache-inducing nightmare of strobe lights and loud, electronic music. Max pats them all on the shoulder before shimmying through the crowd and disappearing. Luisa and Carter each take one of her hands in theirs and drag her along.

There are _so many_ people. They are packed tight around them, exponentially increasing the heat pushing in on her. By the time they’re on the other side of the club, she feels sticky and clammy. But there’s more space here, round booths up on elevations overlooking the dancefloor.

Carter climbs up and drops himself into the laps of a short African-American girl with purple dreadlocks, a pale girl with long waves of blonde hair, and an Asian boy with a platinum undercut. They are the kind of colorful people she expects at a university in a city like this, and exactly the kind of people she expected Luisa to hang out with.

Max returns with a tray full of drinks. It’s chock full, the liquid trembling inside the tiny glasses as she shoves the tray onto the table. “This one’s on Carter, who was stupid enough to bet against me.”

They all say “here, here,” and throw a first shot back. Then the group scatters onto the dance floor. Carter and the girl with dreadlocks stay behind, the others are gone, but Luisa is here and looking at her with an unreadable expression and Rose wants to ask her but it’s too loud and it’s not the place.

Instead she cocks her head towards the dance floor and arches her brow.

Luisa nods and pulls her along.

Suddenly having to be packed so tightly together isn’t problematic anymore. Their bodies are pressed flush together and she can feel every minute detail of Luisa’s movements, every twist of her hips and every brush of her legs.

Luisa makes it worse by standing up on her toes and brushing her lips along the shell of Rose’s ear. “No one would see if I put my hand beneath your dress right now.”

Rose growls softly, hands clenching around Luisa’s bare sides, palms pressing against her hips.

“Hey, I didn’t say I would. Just... seeing if I can drive you crazy.”

_I already am._

* * *

A song shifts into another song shifts into another song. The music never ceases. Luisa dances almost the entire night, stopping only to tip glasses back of whatever Max is buying with Rose’s money. Rose has the money, and if a part of her hopes to get in good with Luisa’s friends to augment her chances at staying together with her lover then it’s definitely a good cause.

Rose gets tired after an hour of dancing though. She’s on high heels and she isn’t used to this. Luisa kisses her hard, lips sticky with a flavored liquor but bruising with the girl’s inherent ferocity, then tells her it’s okay to take a breather for a moment. “You’re old, after all.”

She pats Luisa on the ass before she leaves.

“We’re teaching you the secret handshake,” Zukaira, the girl with the beautiful dreadlocks, tells her when she joins them at the table. They do—it’s an intricate, complex routine with lots of fist bumps, fake explosions, shoulder taps and face palms.

She could remember it if she tried, but she is a little pre-occupied watching Luisa.

The girl is intoxicating when she’s dancing close to you, but she is something else, something divine, when you’re watching from afar. She’s a vortex whirling in place, a barely-contained tornado waiting to break loose.

“I still can’t believe _you_ are Lu’s Rose,” Carter shouts, peeking down an empty shot glass and then putting it in his pocket. “But she does always get the really hot and out-of-our-league ones.

“Cheers to that,” Max shouts back, throwing a shot back and slamming the glass upside down on the table. “To never getting laid when Luisa’s around. But…” And she turns to look at Rose and it’s serious, the goofy smile is gone. “I’m glad you two fixed your shit. Or, you forgave her. But here’s the thing, Rose—you’re good for her. So fucking good. That kid, she needs someone good in her life. Don’t let her fuck that up, okay? She doesn’t realize it yet, but she’s so cuckoo for you.” She downs another shot then, finger guns at Carter and climbs over him to get gone.

Rose goes back to watching Luisa dance, the liquor burning in the back of her throat and the words burning into her mind. Two polar opposite people saying the same thing must mean there's some truth to it.

The dancing isn’t polished, but it’s undeniable. She exudes so much confidence and energy and raw sexuality, and she laughs with her whole body, the music bringing out another side of her Rose has never gotten to see. There are hints of her ballerina past in her twirls, of her inherent prowess in every body roll, but most of her moves aren’t so much moves as _movements_ , fluid and guided along by the music.

She makes it look so easy to dance like nobody’s watching.

Then their eyes meet. Maybe she’s dancing like _everyone_ is watching but she doesn’t care. Luisa smiles slowly and beckons her over with a curl of her finger.

Rose could never say no.

* * *

The club becomes insubstantial when Luisa draws her in. It’s late, much later than Rose thinks it is, but her thoughts are all muddled up. She might have to admit she has gotten a little drunk. She isn’t quite as steady on her heels, because she feels a little—floaty, insubstantial herself.

There is still the sticky, crawling heat but not the people, the deep vibrating thrums of the music sync their heartbeats. There is a whole world around them that melts down to just this little space between them.

The kiss is too soft and tender in comparison. So fragile it breaks when Luisa cups her ass firmly and pulls them closer to each other, by Rose moaning softly against the girl’s mouth. “Luisa...”

“Do you trust me?”

“Yes.”

She should have said no.

Luisa finds them a spot of wall that people aren’t yet leaning against. The crowd doesn’t care; the crowd doesn’t even see them. Which makes it so easy for them to go back to kissing, the slow building of it that usually leads to more.

“I told you I was going to make you pay,” Luisa purrs into her ear, then cups a hand over her sex and rubs her slowly through her panties. Rose cants her hips down, trying to gain more friction, but Luisa’s touch softens more and more each time she does that.

“Fuck.” Her head rolls back against the wall, her eyes on the people in front of them. There are dozens upon dozens of people in their _direct_ vicinity, close enough to see something they shouldn’t see if they look this way, and instead of letting that bother her, she is just desperate for more.

This breaks so many rules, this could have so many consequences. But Luisa grinds her palm against Rose’s clit and the world blinks away again.

Luisa’s touch is never enough. She keeps it deliberately soft, not long enough. Her panties are soaked, but they still don’t get pushed aside. “Lu,” Rose whimpers, whole body now moving with a consuming desperation to have _more_.

But Luisa keeps avoiding giving her full satisfaction.

Rose reaches out and fists her hands around the waistband of Luisa’s jeans, pulls her closer at them and bites down on Luisa’s bottom lip. In return, Luisa nudges her panties aside and runs her knuckle softly across her clit.

They go from too soft to tearing each other apart, every bite and kiss and scratch resulting in more pressure, more fingers, harder, faster, more. Luisa sucks a hickey onto her pulse point and doesn’t _stop_ sucking until Rose has to squirm away, unable to take more.

They are ravaging each other.

Rose has her hand into Luisa’s panties too in a matter of seconds, all it took undoing the button on her pants to make enough space. Luisa has to hold onto them to keep them from falling down to her feet, but it’s a sacrifice well worth making.

Of course Rose comes first. Luisa always manages to make her come undone so fast, it’s pathetic. She rides Luisa’s fingers harder as she comes, to make it that more mind-blowing, and feels Luisa do the same—mostly because she has stopped moving her hand, too busy being overwhelmed by pleasure.

When she comes down from her high she gets to look at Luisa in all her flushed, frenzied glory. Her hair sticks to the sides of her face and her skin glistens with a sheen of sweat, drops collecting in the hollows of her collar bones—and she’s the most beautiful person Rose has ever seen.

She keeps her eyes trained on Luisa’s as she gets fingered, for every small flicker on her face, every shift of muscles, until she seizes up and screams her name into the crashing noise of the club, heard by no one except Rose.

Luisa leans against Rose leaning against the wall, breathing evening to a more normal pace, hearts slowing down to match back up with the music. There is something so fucked-up lovely about this moment, even after what they just did, the filthy place they’re at, Luisa’s friends probably knowing what they’re up to.

Rose kisses the top of Luisa’s head.

“Do you want to get out of here?” Luisa asks, looking up from where she has pillowed her head on top of Rose’s breasts. “I’m a little tired.”

“Tired?”

“Well, I want to go to bed, anyway.”

They walk through the club hand-in-hand, winding their way through the crowd and back to the booth. Everyone is sitting there, save for the Asian boy, and all turn their gazes on them immediately.

“Did you guys have sex?” Max asks without even looking a bit ashamed about it.

Rose doesn’t know what to do, but Luisa apparently knows no shame either. “Of course we did.”

Max pounds her fists on the table and hollers a shout that gets lost in the bass dropping, but for the second time that night she has friends handing over money to her. Apparently it really doesn’t do to bet against Max.

* * *

Luisa throws her arms in the air and hollers, “WOO!”, and then “I love this fucking night,” and then “C’mere”. She falls back against the wall of the building they were just passing, drags Rose against her and kisses her, open-mouthed and hot and dizzying.

The cold air helps to clear her mind some of the haze of alcohol, but nothing to clear her of all Luisa’s influence.

“Shit, you’re so—Rose, I can’t. I can’t even think of a word to describe you.”

Rose can’t help but smile goofily at that, heart soaring at the words—lack of words. “Then don’t. Use your mouth for something else.”

“You’re so insatiable, baby.”

For the rest of the night, Rose can’t forget Luisa calling her _baby_. She hears echoes of it every time they stop along the way to her apartment to kiss. She hears echoes of it when they stay off each other long enough to unlock her door. She hears echoes of it when Luisa whispers it into the skin of her thighs, against her clit, against her throat, against her heart. She hears echoes of it when they curl up together, naked and sweaty and exhausted and sated, her head propped up on Luisa’s chest.

She hears Luisa’s heart beat steadily and she swears she hears _baby, baby, baby_ every time.

She’s got it so bad.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading!


	5. just holding on for tonight

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh my god, I can't believe I just finished this. It feels so surreal. Even though I only started this last week, it still felt like a journey, you know? And a really powerful one, too.
> 
> Thank you to everyone who's been on this journey with me, who's followed Rose and Lusia's story. Thank you!
> 
> I'm going to miss this baby asshole Luisa so much.
> 
> [Won't be proofread until tomorrow, excuse the typos.]

Luisa keeps waiting for the other shoe to drop. There is not a single part—molecule, atom—of her that thinks this is going to end well. Rose is going to say or do something again, and she is going to run again. And this time, she’s likely to keep running.

Because she doesn’t _do_ this. She doesn’t _go steady_. She doesn’t allow girls to become a permanent fixture in her life, only a temporary fixture in her bed.

Luisa hits hard and leaves fast.

Yet it has been six weeks with Rose and it’s still happening. She can blame only so much on how deeply satisfying it is to melt Rose down from her tight, neat outfits and perfectly coiffed hair to a real mess. On how much fun it is to corrupt the lawyer that made her _work_ for her redemption this time.

The excuses are stretching thin even for her.

This is more. Or it’s dangerously close to becoming it, and Luisa knows Rose wants it to. She can see it every time Rose keeps herself from saying something, in the look flitting across Rose’s face every time Luisa leaves in the morning before breakfast.

They have sex a lot and dinner sometimes, and for Luisa that’s more than enough. For Rose, it obviously isn’t. Of course she’d be the _nesting_ kind of lesbian. She has locked herself up in her high and mighty lawyer’s tower so long that the first bit of human warmth makes her crave trips to Home Depot together and probably a freaking _dog_ or something.

All that crosses her mind in the instant before her surroundings crash in on her, eyes blinking open blearily. The memories of last night at the club come to her first, flashes of lights and sounds and people trickling into her sleepy, foggy brain. Then she shifts and feels the silk sheets of Rose’s bed beneath her, the fluffy springiness of her fantastic mattress.

A moan pushes out of her, breaking her slow gathering of sensory input, as she feels lips pluck at her clit, the suction too little to really roll through her, but enough to feel sparks of it throughout her body.

It’s the softest way she has ever been woken up.

“Good morning,” Rose husks from between her legs. She is sprawled across the bed, Luisa’s thighs lifted over her shoulders, red locks pulled back in a neat ponytail that looks so perfectly mess-upable. “Did you sleep well?”

“Hm, yeah,” Luisa breathes, grinning as she easily pulls the elastic band out of Rose’s hair to let it fall down around her face again, brushing against the inside of her thighs. Only then does she notice that Rose is fully dressed. “Shit, you’re going into work after this?”

“Mhm, sure am.” The vibrations add that bit extra to Rose’s slow, teasing exploring of her core to finally get her going. Luisa arches against her mouth, hips rising off the mattress. “This is just for you, Lu. To thank you for last night.”

She’ll have to remember to bring her along more often. The thought strikes another chord of panic though, because that’s exactly the sort of thing she _shouldn’t_ be thinking. Rose is conditioning her to want to stick around longer. What a very manipulative and… _Luisa_ thing of her to do.

She would be impressed if she wasn’t also trying to figure out how to keep this from spiraling out of control.

Her thoughts vanish when Rose’s lips trail down the insides of her thighs, fingers rubbing gently along her hips, because _hey, no_. She says so, too. “Hey, no!”

When Rose goes back to eating her out, Luisa is sure to keep her hands tightly fisted in the woman’s hair, to hold her while she rubs herself up against her lover’s mouth. She’s floating between enough pleasure and not enough at all, half-tensed, half-building, _waiting_.

And she doesn’t _wait_.

Rose seems to sense it though, or feel it, because she laps her tongue around Luisa’s clit and sucks on it hard, and when she feels just the sharp edge of teeth graze softly against the slick bundle of nerves her whole body seizes, riding her orgasm for all it’s worth against Rose’s face.

She slackens onto the bed again with a breathless chuckle, eyes glued onto Rose’s _drenched_ face. It isn’t even pretty, and Luisa should maybe feel a little bad about it, but she doesn’t at all. “You should probably go shower again.”

“Didn’t think you’d take over like that,” Rose mumbles back, smiling as she kisses down Luisa’s leg and then slides off the bed altogether. “Just pull the door closed when you leave. Or stay, if you want. We could resume this later.”

Luisa really shouldn’t spend the whole day in Rose’s apartment. It’s so counter-productive to trying _not_ to become a part of Rose’s life and Rose a part in hers, but when she makes it so tempting... She does.

* * *

Before she even knows what’s happening, she’s spending the whole weekend at Rose’s place. In _one go_. No going back to the hotel in between, no bouncing between people to hang out with. Her fight or flee instinct is very awake inside her, but the loveliness of getting to sit in her underwear on Rose’s couch and making the sophisticated, responsible woman buy her fruit loops to eat in the morning is undeniable.

It’s so much like being in Carter’s dorm room, in underwear and socks, with a bowl of cereal on their bellies as they lie on their backs to stare up at the ceiling—except she’s not high on pot around Rose, and she never tries to get in Carter’s pants.

Luisa doesn’t so much decide to stay as she just doesn’t actively choose to leave.  There is no real difference except to her; it’s all in the semantics and in how much denial she can muster.

Hours go by in blissful domesticity. She can study here just as well as at the hotel—maybe even better—and Rose makes her coffee with less grumbling than the staff at the bars and restaurants usually do, but every time she thinks ‘ _I could get used to this.’_ or _‘Why don’t we have more days like this?’_ it all catches back up to her, and suddenly she goes right back to feeling like she’s only a minute away from sprinting away as fast as she can.

When she leaves on Sunday she feels as if she has run several marathons over the weekend; sore, exhausted, and like even a full day of sleep won’t restore all the energy that has drained out of her.

She calls her first speed dial as she walks home—Rose offered to drive her, even proposed they take the Lamborghini, but Luisa insisted on walking, and she always does get what she wants.

“Max, I need you to talk to me,” Luisa murmurs into her phone. It’s starting to darken and she’s all alone on the streets, but she has never been scared in Miami before. That isn’t it. Still, she’s shaking and there’s a throb of pain coming from somewhere, but she can’t pinpoint _where_ and that’s just driving her mad.

There is some rustling on the other side of the line, then she hears Carter being shoved roughly away and out the door. “Sounds serious, I’m here.”

She kicks at a rock and listens to it skitter ahead of her. “I just spent the weekend at Rose’s.”

“Did you guys have fun?”

“Yeah, sure, I guess. But now I feel like fucking _crap_. Like I had the shit beat out of me.”

“Maybe it was too much at once. Gotta take it one day at a time.”

“I think I need to end things with Rose.” It’s quiet on Max’s side so long that Luisa checks if the call has disconnected; it hasn’t. “Max?”

“You’re kidding, right? _Dude,_ ” Max groans, and Luisa can hear Carter’s voice from very far away, asking _something_ Max completely ignores. “Listen to me. Don’t make any decisions when you’re on the low end of your energy, okay? It looks like you’re really enjoying being around Rose and that’s not a bad thing.”

It’s the worst to be friends with a psychology major. Max has always treated her like a side passion project, but Luisa doesn’t mind being prodded from all sides because she never gives a straight answer anyway. She gives _very gay_ ones. The girl is also a ball of fun when she doesn’t have her psych glasses on.

“Okay. I’ll hold on for tonight, then.”

“You do that. Are you almost home?”

And they talk about the pop quiz they have tomorrow for the English Lit class that all three of them took this year to have a class together, about how none of them have read it yet, and about how Carter is eating through Max’s sizeable collection of pop-tarts way too fast, until Luisa steps into the brightly-lit lobby of the Marbella and can feel the familiarity of it wrap a comforting blanket of warmth around her.

“Arrived home safe and sound. Go read the book! I need someone to copy off of.”

But she can’t sleep. She paces through her room, shuts the curtains to the balcony and opens them again to keep letting cold air in, downs a glass of cold water and then a shot of vodka. Nothing helps. She puts on a hoodie on top of her pajamas, which is not wearing anything but panties, and crawls onto her couch, the audiobook of _The Grapes of Wrath_ ready to start playing.

Maybe Max and Carter will be copying off of _her_ instead.

* * *

Luisa likes to run. She does a lot of metaphorical running away, but she also does a lot of it non-metaphorically. When she can’t sleep, and she doesn’t have very last-minute homework to do, she’ll head to the gardens of the Marbella and run laps until her breath thunders out of her and her legs start to feel like jelly.

Because she can’t seem to sleep any night that week, there is a lot of running.

On Thursday night she finally caves and, lying face-up in the pool to cool down her heated skin and pounding head, calls Rose. Her phone lies on the edge of the basin, on speaker, and Rose’s voice echoes across the empty terrace.

“Luisa?”

“Hey, yeah, did I wake you?” She paddles a little with her feet so she starts drifting around, more or less in place.

“Are you okay?”

“No, I don’t think I am.”

And just like that, she can hear Rose get up out of bed, even though it’s... who knows how late, but Luisa hasn’t heard a single other person for hours. “I’ll be there in a minute.”

A minute is almost accurate. Luisa blinks at the night sky, watching the few pricks of light visible despite all the light pollution from the city, and blinks again and there she is, towering just into her vision. She disappears then—Luisa thinks she might have imagined her—but then arms slide beneath her and Rose is in the water with her, her clothes and heels neatly piled onto the stone.

How did she not notice that?

Luisa curls into Rose’s body and closes her eyes. “I can’t sleep.”

“How long have you been in this water? You’re so cold to the touch.”

“Dunno. A while.”

She blinks and they’re in the lobby, dripping water all over the tile floor.

She blinks and they’re in the elevator, her body heavily leaning into Rose’s side, but she doesn’t complain. Rose talks, but to Luisa it sounds like they’re submerged in water. It sounds distorted and garbled.

She blinks and Rose swaddles her in towels, rubs them through her hair and down her arms, holds her close to make her warm.

She blinks. Her alarm is going off, but the person next to her reaches out for her phone and makes it shut up. Luisa tries to recollect the night before, but can only think of blue water and red hair. She turns onto her side and feels an arm shift across her waist.

“Go back to sleep. You need it.” She burrows into Rose’s front, content to delve into her warmth and let it coax her back to sleep. The arms around her tighten. “Don’t worry, I’m here.”

* * *

This Friday morning couldn’t be more different from last Friday’s. Rose doesn’t wake her up with sex, doesn’t wake her up _at all_. It’s past noon when Luisa finally stops sleeping like the dead. She still feels tired, but it’s not a physical one. Her body is glad for the rest; it feels recharged now. Her mind doesn’t feel recharged at all.

Rose left a post-it note with a little doodle of a sleeping cat and a thermos of coffee on her nightstand. There are many concerned text messages on her phone, Max asking where she’s at and Carter asking where she’s at and Rose asking if she feels better now.

When did all these people sneak up on her? How has she started caring about them so much?

There is no point going to class now, so she takes her sweet time showering the last tendrils of cold out of her, the chloride off her skin and the ache from her bones. Being wrapped in a towel doesn’t feel nearly as good as it did last night.

She can’t stop thinking about Rose.

That much has been true for weeks. Rose has been on her mind constantly, like a _virus_ or something, but it’s especially stubborn this morning. She brushes her teeth and thinks of the time they got ready in the morning together, all bumping hips and laughing at each other with toothpaste frothing between their lips, minty fresh kisses and brilliant white smiles.

She needs distraction. And she knows just where to find it, too.

* * *

“We haven’t done this in a while.”

“Yeah, I know. But no talking, let’s just do it.”

Rafael nods and puts his skateboard down beneath his foot. Most floors in the hotel are carpeted, but in the basement none of them are. They discovered that when she was fifteen and he was nine. They’ve been skateboarding down here ever since.

One of the corridors slopes, so it’s the perfect ramp to get started from.

They kick off more or less simultaneously, but Rafael is heavier with his growing bulk, so he speeds on ahead. Luisa watches him, feels the rush kick through her, feels warmth because Rafael is smiling and she is smiling and she might not like her family, but she does like her brother. He rounds the corner and then face plants right to the concrete, judging by his sounds.

That has happened a lot over the years, too.

Luisa jumps off in time not to follow Rafael’s fate. Someone has stacked crates in the corridor, ruining the route they usually follow, around corners and down damp, musty parts of the basement no one visits anymore.

Well, she got to stop thinking about Rose for a minute, at least.

“You okay?” she asks as she helps Rafael upright and looks him over.

He grins, wide and beaming. “Are you kidding me? That was _awesome_.”

* * *

Max knows about the dinner party she’s supposed to attend with Rose tonight, and Max knows _her_ , so she shows up at the hotel at five pm with shots of tequila and Zukaira in tow. By this point, Luisa has driven herself crazy with all her thinking, so the alcohol is more than welcome.

While Luisa and Max drink—“Liquid courage!”—Zukaira tries to comb a week’s neglect worth of knots out of her hair and turn it into something resembling elegance. But that’s the girl’s power: she can turn anyone’s hair into something nice and situation-appropriate.

She once gave Carter the _cutest_ pigtails. He didn’t take them out for days.

Luisa sighs as she looks into the mirror. Apparently she’s _doing this_. It’s not a date, Rose isn’t her girlfriend, but the prospect of tonight still fills her stomach with painful, nervous fluttering.

She misses the look her two friends give each other as she carefully applies smokey eyes and lip gloss, but catches the tail end of them performing the secret handshake. After slapping them both on the butt and rolling her eyes at them, she tells them to wait right here so she can go put her dress on.

It’s a beautiful, deep purple color and fabric that feels like a soft touch against her skin. The upper body is lace, long sleeves to her wrists, round neckline. The skirt is long and drags a little over the floor. It’s the classiest dress she has ever worn and it makes her feel like prom night all over again.

Except she changed into a slutty party dress at the last minute and had a blast, but everyone had seen that one coming from a mile away.

There is no changing into anything else. Not because she doesn’t have any options, but because she feels so beautiful in it that she couldn’t stand to take it off.

She might regret this later, but it seems like she can’t even talk herself out of going anymore.

* * *

“Lu...”

Luisa smiles as she sees Rose do a double take of her. They chose their outfits together, but Luisa was adamant on not _showing_ herself wearing it in the store, and she’s glad for that now.

Rose is wide-eyed, open-mouthed amazement.

Never grows old to have that effect on people.

“You look so beautiful.”

Luisa runs her eyes slowly over Rose right back, the tight black button-down and the deep purple suit jacket, matching tie, tight pants. She looks dapper and handsome and delectable. Already she’s craving to seduce Rose out of every piece of it.

“So do you.”

Of course they take the Lamborghini. Luisa doesn’t get to drive, but just being in back in it is enough for now. The purr of its engine, the way it seems to break through gravity to fly across the roads fills her with such simple joy that it steels her for what’s to come.

Because this is happening. She is going somewhere as Rose’s _plus one_.

The house is beautiful, with a winding marble staircase leading up to the front doors, lots of elegant and curling elements, arches and iron-wrought window frames. Luisa doesn’t have the sort of art knowledge to think of the house in its proper terms, but she does know that it could have come right out of a picture book.

Rose kisses her cheek before they’re ushered up the red carpet rolled across the steps and in through the open front doors.

The inside is what she expects a pompous lawyer’s house to look like. Lacquered floor boards with Persian rugs, lots of expensive art in equally expensive frames, lots of expensive art stalled out on pedestals and in glass boxes.

There are so many people that know Rose and come greet her, and Luisa stands beside the redhead and tries to smile and look interested, though the conversations pass her by and names stick only fleetingly in her mind.

She recognizes Victoria though, who does a double take before approaching them.

“You two look so _wonderful_ , my god.” Rose hugs her, and Luisa gives her a smile that’s more genuine than all her previous ones have been. “The others from the office are already in there.”

They’re much nicer to Luisa now that she’s on Rose’s arm and not just Rose’s trouble brought to work, but she’s still not in it. In fact, she’s starting to disconnect more and more from her surroundings and the people milling around her, the ones that greet Rose and ask her if she has finally landed herself a girlfriend to keep, and it’s dangerous that not even those words can break her out of it.

She can only breathe when Rose drags her into an empty hallway.

Luisa surges up and drags Rose down at her tie at the same time, kissing her. There’s something clawing at her from the inside and she isn’t sure how to make it go away except by doing _this_.

This being to see how far she can get Rose to go with all her colleagues and associates around, at a formal function. That’s why she said yes to this, after all. It had seemed like a ball of fun to try and have sex here. She just hadn’t expected she would get to such a complicated, twisted, messed-up mind space.

The only thing keeping her from bolting is the tequila fuzzing her up a little.

“That hurts a little,” Rose mutters as she eases Luisa’s grip on her tie. The darkness in her eyes and the little bit of red blemishing freckled cheeks lets her in on a little secret though: she likes it.

Luisa smirks and playfully winds the tie around her finger. “Yeah? Should I kiss it better?” She opens up the collar of Rose’s blouse and kisses sweetly where the tie pulled against her throat, hands hard around Rose’s hips to keep her from squirming.

“Oh, we can’t,” Rose sighs, though she arches into Luisa and doesn’t push her away. “They’ll expect us back in there soon. Dinner should be served soon.”

“I know something else we can eat.”

But Rose shakes her head and then, finally, steps away decidedly. “Later, okay?”

Luisa follows along back into the spacious room with maroon curtains and framed degrees propped up on the fireplace mantle and the long table set for dinner with a bunch of guests. It’s nothing like the dinner party she invited Rose to, but that doesn’t mean she can’t do the same thing she did back then.

She can try to arouse Rose at the table _just_ as much, and their chairs are even closer together this time.

“Let’s see how long you hold out,” she whispers in Rose’s ear, under the guise of kissing her on her cheek. “I love playing this game.”

* * *

She drinks too much wine and eats too little. It lands on the foundation of tequila and they storm up a party. But rather than making her as horny and desperate for attention as it usually does, it makes it easier for Luisa to go up in the conversations around her.

Of course she’s still trying a little. Her fingers trail along the seam of Rose’s pants stretched across the inside of her thighs, but the touch is light and teasing, nothing much.

She’s talking to Madison, a woman Rose went to Harvard with, and she finds she’s really enjoying the conversation. They laugh a lot, and Rose blushes at all the silly stories being brought up for Luisa’s entertainment, but there is something so alive and wonderful in Rose’s eyes, too, that it takes Luisa’s breath away.

There’s been an orchestra softly playing in the background all this time, another elitist thing that made Luisa want to put herself on fire, but she must admit the music is nice. Their volume increases when the last dish is cleared away and everyone scatters, into little groups that pick up dinner conversation right back up.

Inexplicably, Luisa feels like dancing.

It might be that she’s drunk, it might be that she feels such affection for Rose and her mind is too quiet for her to deny that she does. Either way, before Rose can take even a step away from her, Luisa has pulled her back at a hand and wraps an arm around her waist.

“Dance with me?”

Rose’s face lights up with her smile.

They sway together. The music isn’t appropriate for the kind of grinding and heat that transpired between them at the club, but this still proximity accomplishes more or less the same. Luisa wants to devour Rose for all she’s worth.

But this is also nice in a way that not many things in her life are, and so rather than breaking the moment, Luisa allows it to last, revels in the music and being close enough to Rose to count her eyelashes and all the million freckles spread across her skin and smell the perfume clinging to her throat and the scent of vintage red wine on her breath.

Her insides shiver with the intimacy of this endless moment.

Although it does end. All things eventually do. Luisa usually breaks beautiful moments apart like a nuclear explosion, in the most destructive way, but now they just part and understand that _something_ just happened. Something just changed.

Rose takes one of her hands and tugs her along with her.

They’re kissing as soon as the door closes behind them, stumbling up the stairs to peruse Richy Rich’s pathetically expensive house for their own desires. There are more elaborate decorations on the upper floors, more art that makes no sense to her.

She points out as much when they finally find a room, with a _preposterous_ four-poster bed that is exactly the kind of bullshitty bed she wants to fuck Rose in right now, that also has an ugly little statue of a goat on a side table.

“I mean, I, too, want this ugly little fucker to look at me while I fuck a lady.”

Rose laughs, and shakes her head, and says: “Oh god, I’m so in love with you.”

And finally the moment, the one that has been building through every day this kept on going, every night Luisa couldn’t sleep because something was suffocating her, every moment of them spent together in which it was so easy to deny that Rose would always want more and Luisa would always want less than even the barest of things—that moment, it breaks _Luisa_ apart.

* * *

Luisa runs. Not very far, only to the other side of the room, in slow steps, but it still feels like running. And she’s so _tired_ of running. After the week she has had, and the life she has had, she just wants to stop.

But she can’t do that. She hasn’t a single clue how.

“Lu, I’m sorry,” Rose says, and she actually sounds sorry. Luisa is sorry, too. And shaking. She’s doing a lot of that. “I know it’s early, and I know you didn’t want to hear it, but I couldn’t stop it. It’s true and I can’t stop feeling that way.”

All that time, Luisa is murmuring “Don’t do this”, but of course Rose does it.

“Luisa, what happened to you to make you this way?”

Luisa never cries, but she cries now, a single few tears melting through her face like they’re corrosive. She waits until they’re gone before she turns to face Rose, because the other would just try to comfort her and she doesn’t think she can stand to be touched right now.

She feels so insubstantial, so _barely_ a person that a single touch would probably blow her apart and scatter her on the wind.

“I don’t know. It’s always been like this. I never learned otherwise. Ever since mamá...”

Rose takes a few tentative steps forward, their eyes are locked, but they don’t touch and for that Luisa is so grateful it makes her knees weak. No matter what Rose could need in this moment, she’s not demanding it, instead choosing to give Luisa what she needs instead.

“Would it be so terrible if you tried?”

“I don’t know how to be this person, someone that...” She trails her sentence off, looking helplessly up at Rose.

“Dates someone?”

“Loves you.”

Rose is so quiet and still, completely unmoving, eyes sharpening and breath hitching in her throat. She becomes cold and marble for a moment, but it doesn’t take long before she’s back to being warm and alive and smiling this small, happy smile that makes Luisa weak.

“That’s not something you know. It just happens.”

Luisa sits down on the bed, feeling so tiny and feeling so strongly all the ways in which she has been dysfunctional all her life. But when Rose sits down, she slides her fingers through Rose’s, and knows that there’s nothing she can do about that except try not to be like that anymore.

Even if it means losing the certainty that she’ll never be hurt again like how much hurt she was put through when she lost the only person she loved, but loved so hard she would have taken on the world just to make her happy.

She finally stops clutching her grief like a shield against everything life can throw at her and _feels_.

* * *

“You can’t say it again until I’m ready,” Luisa whispers, nimble fingers undoing a row of buttons on a pitch black blouse, knuckles dragging through the valley between Rose’s breasts that is so sinfully colored with dark orange freckles. She dips down to kiss Rose’s sternum and feels the woman beneath her tremble.

Rose nods. “Done. I won’t say it again until you’re ready.”

“And I’m not going to stay over at your place again until we’ve gone on at least three dates.” Her hands usually go straight for Rose’s breasts, but now they trace every line and curve and dip of her body, the smooth plane of her stomach and the carving between her ribs.

“Okay. Can I take you out on a date tomorrow?”

“Yes.”

Luisa wanted to string Rose up to the bed with her tie when she entered the room, but drawing the curtains closed around them and slowly exploring what they’re becoming is so much better. Because she can’t deny any longer that she has a crush on Rose, and it colors _this_ in an entirely different light.

She wants to study every inch of Rose, every breath and movement.

And Luisa always gets what she wants.

* * *

**FIVE MONTHS LATER**

* * *

Luisa sits on the floor, wearing only one of Rose’s suit jackets and a pair of panties, her hair a tangled mess, because it has been one of those mornings. The apartment is cozy and brightly lit, a sharp contrast to how grey and dreary even _Miami_ becomes in Winter.

Rose gets down on the floor with her, hands her a mug of tea, and looks over at the envelopes spread across her carpet. Her head tilts to look at Luisa, who is ignoring her to stare at the wall and chew on the nail of her thumb. “You’ll have to open them eventually.”

“I know. Doesn’t mean it has to happen _right now._ Let me enjoy my tea first, please.”

Rose chuckles softly to herself, but by now she is well aware there is no trying to push her girlfriend to do _anything_. She’ll do it when she wants to.

When she got her own replies to application letters for law school she couldn’t wait a single second to tear open the Harvard envelope first. Although she got accepted in multiple places and that sure stroked her ego, none could beat being accepted into her dream school.

Luisa’s had her letters for a week.

“I don’t think I want to stay in Florida,” she whispers, tracing the logo of a Miami-based university. “I always thought I did, and now I should have more of a reason than ever to want to stay, but I don’t.”

“Then don’t.”

“Would that be a problem? For us?”

“Nope.” Rose leans in to kiss her girlfriend gently. “I’ll visit.”

Luisa nibbles on her bottom lip and takes a deep breath before she says, quiet but Rose still hears, “Would you come with me? If I asked?”

“My, oh my, are you asking me to move in somewhere with you?” She doesn’t even have to think about that. “Yes. Anywhere.”

It wasn’t her plan to get stuck in Miami and though it’ll hurt to pass on her parents’ legacy to the capable hands of someone who _isn’t her_ , watching Luisa let go of the loss of her mother taught Rose something about letting go, too.

“Are we really doing this then?” Luisa nods towards the letters, looking crisp and white and taunting, and shuffles to go sit in Rose’s lap so she can be held through the process. “Okay. Here goes then.”

“Hey, Lu? I’m really proud of you. Most of these envelopes look too thick to be rejections.”

Luisa basks into the warmth of her girlfriend’s body, the perfect simplicity of this moment, and the knowledge that she is so in love with this woman, even if she isn’t ready to say it yet. Their lives together are stretching out in front of them, a thousand paths, a million moments for her to say it.

And it all starts with figuring out where they’ll be headed after the summer. It’ll be a crazy, wild adventure. But fuck baby steps, right?

Luisa has been in trouble too many times before for anyone to believe she isn’t _all about_ crazy, wild adventures.

* * *

**THE END**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I would love to hear what you guys thought about the ending, and the story in general? I hope you enjoyed it, at least.
> 
> Stay tuned for undoubtedly many more Roisa stories on this account! :)


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